She knew immediately. That morning, when she went to wake up her son, she found instead an impostor. The boy had the same complexion, the same silhouette when backlit by the morning sun, the same tone of voice when he said ‘good morning.’ To everyone else, he would’ve been the same sweet William she bore a bit over a decade ago. But curse her for being a mother; she knew that wasn’t her son.
She’d heard of it, of children being replaced in the dead of night - changeling, the locals called them. It wasn’t a frequent enough occurrence to take it as a matter of course, yet it wasn’t rare enough to be disbelieved: when such a creature was found, the parent ought to cry in the town plaza so the thing could be banished to the woods whence it came.
It was an insult to the child stolen, to have a shameless pretender in their place, to have a thief swindle an innocent mother into loving a beast.
She’d heard such things her whole life, and seen it happen more than once. She didn’t doubt when she picked up her hat and coat, to head down the mountain to the town proper and give the calling cry. The boy - the creature - was perceptive: It realised too soon for its own good that its ruse had failed. It jumped out of bed, playing dumb, asking ‘his mother’ why she was in such a rush. She didn’t answer, this was a deceitful beast talented in the spinning of lies. Then, as she reached for the doorknob, it said (in a last effort to save its hide) “I’ll bring your son back, just let me-”
“Lie to me,” she whipped around, willing him to silence, “cheat me and steal from me, devil, but don’t mention the sweet boy you killed. Don’t tarnish him with your vile words.” She, as best she could, subsumed her grief in anger.
He - it, it’s an it - didn’t reply. More so, it retreated into itself. Did it feel shame? No, merely an act to evoke empathy. No matter.
She turned back toward the door, opened it, and-
A wall of white. Snow, far thicker than she could remove, from floor to ceiling.
She stood there a moment, staring. She was trapped. Trapped with this mockery, mocked further by God and his damned snow. She wasn’t crestfallen, or hopeless, or saddened beyond compare. She was offended.
And behind her was a facsimile of her son, pretending to be ashamed, of all things. What a joke.
“I suppose we’ll be here a while…” ventured the changeling. Is it trying to ingratiate itself? How pathetic. How lowly could this creature get?
“You’ll be under lock, in the cellar, till someone comes to clear the snow.”
And she did just that: throwing the thing in her cellar, locking it tightly. It didn’t protest at all, which surprised her, but she paid it no further mind.
It was only then, about 5 minutes in all after she first discovered it, that she collapsed on the topmost step of the stair to the sublevel. Her anger gave way, like a failing dam, to her grief.
And no grief compares to that of a mother and child. It was only on the cruellest of days that it’d be from the first about the second, rather than the other way around. Did she fail as a mother? Did some power-that-be deem her undeserving of her William? Did she commit some sin this was punishing? She didn’t know, she didn’t care. She lost her son, and that thought alone consumed all else.
She cried for what must’ve been hours, she stood still with her knees to her brow for longer still, and in all that time not a noise came from the cellar. Did the thing escape, somehow? Who cares? None of it would bring her son back. She realised with some mirthless chuckle that the ritual and show of banishing such pretenders was only to fill through revenge the hole left by whatever child was stolen.
Finally, she got up. Feel what she may, she had to eat. Rather, she had to do something else than cry.
She looked through the ingredients, tried to figure out what she’d be able to stomach - nothing. Defeated, she went to put wood in the fireplace, maybe listen to the radio while she warmed up. But as she reached for the pile of kindling next to the fireplace, she found it empty. She had more, of course, stored in the cellar for all the other times the house was buried in snow and they needed heat.
But that thing was in the cellar too. She considered whether to go down at all, eventually deciding she’d need to go sooner or later anyway. Would it attack her outright? Best be prepared, and so she went down with her pistol cocked and loaded. She thought, like one often does as a whimsy of memory, that she’d very much like to shoot again. She was a splendid shot in her youth, after all.
She unlocked the door carefully, then cracked it slightly while loudly announcing her intent (why?). She warned the creature she was armed, and it better keep its distance (why give away her advantage?). When she finally pushed the door fully open, it hit something piled on the floor - firewood, gathered and bundled already.
She scanned the room quickly, and found Will- the beast, sat at a corner hugging its knees to its chest. The sight struck her, for a moment - tired as she was, and mournful as she was, that’s her son. There, cornered, scared, hungry, cold, that’s her son.
It took a long moment to dispel the notion, but she couldn’t dispel it fully. A mother is far too loving to let her son go cold, even if it isn’t her son.
“I’ll bring you a small parcel of food, and a cover for warmth. You will stay here.” She turned away before she could regret treating her son - a copy of him - so harshly.
The thing didn’t reply, and even if it wanted to, she wouldn’t have listened. She left in a rush
Only as she was gathering some assorted fruits from her pantry did she stop to consider what she had said. It wasn’t that she didn’t know why that nagged her. The opposite: she knew with utter certainty that she couldn’t help but extend mercy to a child, even a killer. More, the killer of her own child.
She went to the laundry room to fetch one of the spare bed covers, but stopped before taking any from the stack. She held the fruits on one hand; her other rested on the soft blanket she had set out to clean the day before.
Was this what they planned? Did this creature intend her to wish against reason and hope against hope that her son hadn’t died? Did it intend to present itself as a justification for denial? ‘Her son could not be dead, here he was.’
She grimaced. It was as if, for a moment, she was outside of herself; the absurdity of accepting such a lie so completely disgusted her and yet she wished she were more gullible if only it meant believing it.
Her hand didn’t move: she had no obligation to give a monster protection, nor to treat it as anything more than the monster it was. It did not deserve such kindness nor such gifts. But she knew there was not a single other thing she could do; her heart would not permit it.
The absurdity didn’t leave her - it was a monster, it was her child, he was a monster, he was her child. She did not know what she felt, what she thought. She could only observe it from outside; some part of her refused to live this. Was she insulting William? Was all this an insult to him? Did he feel betrayed, in some faraway kingdom of death, looking at her now?
Did any of that matter, when a living creature was cold and she could help?
She took the blanket and went to the cellar.
She opened the door abruptly, unannounced, hitting something with a muffled dull noise. The creature scampered away, startled, before she could fully notice. The room had nothing to hide behind, so it was forced to simply huddle at the farthest corner it could, hugging itself into a tight little ball.
She stood there, unmoving: observing its shape against the corner. Her face still betrayed no emotion at all. Rather, it was some unnerving combination of curiosity and contempt; hatred submerged in grief, over instinctual love.
The room was dark. Did the creature not know how to turn on the light? Perhaps it just preferred darkness. It would be fitting, some resentful part of her thought. The beast didn’t move, other than breathing. At first, it hid its face into itself, but eventually it raised its gaze towards the light coming from the door and her silhouette against it; she saw its eyes glow against the light, like an animal’s.
She placed the food basket on the floor and unfolded the blanket flat, then left and put the lock again. She stayed holding the doorknob, as quiet as she could.
It was minutes before she heard tentative shuffling inside. She exhaled. She did not question why she felt relief. The thing was warm now, at least.
Only when she got to the top of the stairs and saw it on the counter did she realise she hadn’t had her gun on her. It was twenty defenceless minutes. She would have wanted to be more scared. More exactly, she wanted to have wanted that.
She spent hours doing nothing, paralysed. If she tried not to think about it, to be distracted by a book or radio program, then it would be disrespectful to William; to think about him was torture beyond what anyone could bear.
Some call grief ‘the love that remains’ or ‘love with nowhere to go.’ Hers was almost completely fear: fear of a world without William, fear of a world where she’s alone, fear of a world where she must kill him again for he isn’t himself. She realised, with some indifference, the exact flavour of her grief.
And again, below in her cellar lay the one to cause all this, to insult her like this, to disrespect him like this. She could not be with herself, it was exhausting: the endless procession of sadness, anger, offence, terror; it was only barely the afternoon and she had felt a lifetime pass.
What could she do? What would she do, eventually, when the flow of the world forced her to move on? What should she do, when she couldn’t move on? She glanced at her gun; stared at it. She dismissed it as a matter of course - she would never turn it against herself, not even at the end of the world (Which this was).
It was such a vile insult, death. And now it was salted further by the damned creature who caused all this, the one she fed. Her stomach growled.
She spent hours in the bathroom, trying not to vomit. She remembered a few weeks ago, when William had fallen ill with some bug or other that he had caught at school - on the last day of classes, no less. It was such an unpleasant way to welcome the holidays. It was such a better way compared to this.
It was a minefield strewn about her home. It was every memory of love turned to another thing to grieve. More simply, it was inescapable. She got up only reluctantly, resigned to that minefield: perhaps it’d be fair punishment for all this. For feeding his killer. Why did she do that? If she thought starving to be too cruel, she could have shot it. If she thought shooting a look-alike of her son too difficult, she could close her eyes. If she thought death too simple, she could…
So many things she could have done. Why, out of all of them, was she kind?
She sat at the table, staring blankly at the rest of the simple food she had mustered for herself. The changeling had eaten more than her; it was warmer than her, she had forgotten to feed the fire the last hour. Maybe if she was warm, she could eat more.
While fetching the kindling she had taken from the cellar, she noticed just how silent everything was: the blizzard outside had stopped, it was too cold for birds, the fire was almost out and so didn't even crackle, the radio was off. The world was still. She would have thought that silence and peace would further show her missing William, but he was a quiet child. No, the ache wasn't because of the silence - it was, simply enough, a silence without his silence.
And her own mind stilled too. In the tempest of this tragedy, of this awful awful cataclysm refined and pointed so only she felt it, the world was still; only she had lost him, only she missed him. What did the pines and squirrels care for the poor boy? What did the sun, the sky, care? Heaven was much the same either way. But for a moment, that storm calmed and she was only sad. Briefly, now, she was not whipped by those tortuous winds: she was in her living room, putting kindling on the fire, standing with her hearth at the eye of the storm. It was all so tangible that her own reactions seemed silly by comparison. How could the world be ending if it was all so tranquil?
A loud bang - knocking, from the cellar - took her from such ideas. Another rap of knocks, this time closer to the invented melody William knocked in. She only got up by the third rap, convinced it was not her imagination or an accident. It was the mimic calling her, which was stupid on its part, but a thanked diversion for her (As it was an excused diversion, thus sparing her from any imagined guilt. How good).
She went down the stairs, gun in its holder at her hip, and opened the door - more carefully this time, though not consciously. It was some hidden bit of her mind concerned with not hitting the creature again. She saw, in order: The food, picked-at but uneaten; the edges of the blanket; the changeling, sat on the floor in the middle of the room. It looked at her much like a deer in headlights (It had the eyes for it, anyway). It seemed to not have expected her to answer.
She didn't say anything. The animal's face shifted quickly in the light that filtered from the stairway, considering a litany of options. Should it press an advantage against a weak woman? Provide hope of returning her son? Pretend to be her son still, try her irrationality? Should it be honest? It was all so obvious on its face.
"What is it you want?" she said, eventually. It was devoid of love, all snuffed behind an exaggerate hate.
It hesitated, but eventually settled on answering earnestly: "Water. Please."
That was it? It poked at its captor for water?
Her eyes flicked at the food. The fruits were untouched, barely moved from where she left them.
"What about the food? Why have you not eaten?"
The creature hesitated - for such a perceptive confidence artist, it neglected covering for that detail. Answering would, most likely, irreversibly and absolutely condemn its lie. She knew as much.
"Water. Please. I need water."
"Answer me, creature." Her hand went to rest at her holster, though she didn't mean anything by it.
It hugged its knees and stared at the floor. Even a born liar feels guilt when admitting to it: "I- We cannot eat fruits." It hurried to add: "Or vegetables."
After a much longer pause, while she considered both what to answer and why she asked at all: "We can only eat mushrooms and meat. My kind- My species, I mean."
It had volunteered this information; not what it could eat (it was hungry, this was a covert request), but it had acknowledged that it was inhuman. It had given up on its ruse - from its gaze and posture, it had given up on just about anything. She couldn't deny it was strange, to see the face of her son contorted in such resignation.
"Come up with me," she said. At least Judas got paid for his sin.
The creature sipped slowly from a small glass of tap water as she searched her cabinets for a can of truffles. William despised anything even approximating fungi, so they had sat unopened since last year - not like the changeling was in a position to be picky. Could things like this be picky? Why did she even care?
Finally, she found it buried deep alongside the many other things Will had shirked after a single bite, much in the way children - or immature adults - do. She placed it on the table, meaning to find the can-opener, but the beast lunged for it ravenously. Her hand went to her gun before she could think better, pushing a jar of pickles that smashed into the floor.
The boy retreated into itself as she stood frozen against it. She stared blankly but severely, inscrutable, at the creature in front of her, registering her own reflex. She saw what she was doing; a wave of sensibility lapping at the continent of stupidity she was traversing. She saw the hellish monster standing in her kitchen, drinking her water, eating her food, enjoying her hospitality. And after murdering her son! After insulting and spitting at her!
Her hand didn't move from the holster, but her arm relaxed. She stared at it for a moment longer - she didn't even know what she felt. She slowly turned and kept looking for the can-opener.
She leaned against the counter, watching over the creature as it ate. Here, in the light, and not assaulted by grief so relentlessly (She still was, but manageable; a downpour as opposed to the biblical flood), she could see how poor an imitation it was: the eyes were cattish, the fingers spindly, the teeth where sharp like a dog, the nose was eagle-like. And those were the most obvious of the subtle differences - she noticed too the tone of the hair, of the skin, all those little things only a mother knows.
Then the behaviours: How it ate in the fashion of a fox, how it posed as if hoping for fur to stand on end; how it looked here and there, dartingly, like an afraid little deer. The tension of the muscles beneath its skin was wrong. Everything was wrong. And yet-
She saw in it the son she bore, the son she nursed, the son she raised, and it is beyond description how it feels to know he's not.
She went to speak, and stopped herself. She stood at the last opportunity to turn around and do the right thing. One last chance before she committed to this damnable path. Before she was lost forever - she came to think she'd rather be lost, if she didn't have William. And so, she spoke:
"What's your name?" It's a beast. A monster from fairytales. It had no name.
"Wi-" it began replying.
"No. Your name, beast."
The creature stared, clearly as baffled by the idea as she was. Until, finally:
"Percival," he said.
She thought it a strange name. Percival was the name of a beloved shining knight in children’s tales. Did he pretend to be that?
“What’s yours?” he ventured.
“Why Percival? Did your parents call you that?” she would come to learn, later, he had no name before she asked; nor did he think of one before then.
“I like it.” After some silence: “I can pick another, if you’d rather.”
Something about the tone of voice was unnerving: It was obsequious, yes, and sycophantic. But more, unlike everything else, it was too right; like how a falsified painting lacks the weathering of the original.
“I’m- My name is Mary.”
Well then, that about did it. She had killed animals before; not with pleasure, but not with any issue, either. She would have been justified a minute ago - she still was, that was still her son's killer - but she had never introduced herself to an animal. Not one she killed, anyway.
The silence stretched endlessly.
She steeled herself. She would hate the answer, but she could not live without it.
"Did he suffer?" she asked, not looking at him.
The boy thought for a moment. Without looking at her, he muttered: "Only a little." His voice was small and guilty.
She inhaled sharply, buttressing the dam that held back her grief. The image of her sweet William in agony was burned into her mind. She knew it would never fade.
"What is 'a little'?"
Percival considered how to answer, his eyes darting around the room as if asking for an appropriate comparison. He didn't find any.
"Just a little. He didn't wake up, though."
She felt slight offence that the boy would try to appease her with that comment, but she was much too forlorn to get angry. Not again, and certainly not to the degree as she was before.
The silence stretched again, interminable. The world outside was quiet too, as was she, unable to openly sob out of some strange sense of pride. The only noise was Percival, chewing as ravenously as he felt wasn't rude.
She went to the fireplace, leaving the boy unsupervised two rooms away. Over the crackling welcoming fire, there was framed in ormolu the daguerreotype she had taken of the two of them. She stared at her own smile - oh, if only that stupid woman had known what she had coming. She stared at his tiny black-and-white smile, wistfully - oh, to think she could see that smile in colour, and it would be just another copy.
But she dispelled the notion: Percival had, if not left Will's appearance, then left his character. His body was a copy and yet, perhaps, if he was good, he would only ever be himself.
In this weather, she and Will would be drinking cocoa while she read him one of her many books, while sat next to the warm fire.
She stared awhile.
She heard Percival come to the living room from the kitchen, unwittingly stepping on the creakiest floorboards. It was a discordant chord against the crackle of the fire.
He stood at the threshold, unsure of himself. For a murderer and a confidence artist, she thought, he didn't seem confident in anything.
"I won't forgive you, you know." She didn't turn.
He stayed silent.
"But I doubt you did it on purpose. You don't strike me as the kind that could do such a thing." What did she get out of attacking his pride?
He didn't react, anyway.
"I must imagine it was instinct, an involuntary impulse of some sort. Don't tell me if that isn't the case."
The comment startled her slightly as she said it. Who was this incurious coward she had become? She supposed she too was a pretender now: her true self had died with William. She laughed at that. No, it hadn't. She was herself, and only William had died. Even if the world had ended, she had no choice but to endure.
Percival stepped forward, pulling her out of her mind: "I will leave when the snow clears," he said quietly. It was obvious he would rather do anything else. Then, after an extended silence:
"I'm sorry," he added.
She turned to face him, smiling sadly and with kindness.
She spoke the most horrible words:
"You can stay, Percival."