The Changeling

Sometimes she would sneak out of her rooms in the early morning, when the fog was lifting off the gardens, and find the door in the far hedge. All the other doors were ornate, beautifully carved, or even enchanted.

This one was different.

It was made of plain wood, painted white, with a simple metal doorknob. There was a crayon scribble on the bottom half, smudged as if someone had tried to clean it off and failed, and the residue of tape on the top half. Sarah wanted to open that door. But she couldn’t. Her hands stung and burned if she reached towards the handle, and even when she pushed through the pain, the knob wouldn’t budge.

Her fascination with the door was one of many things Sarah knew she needed to change about herself if she wanted to be truly loved in her home. During dancing lessons, it was Sarah who felt the sharp smack of the teacher’s correction rod. No matter how tall she stood, she couldn’t seem to match the ethereal grace of even the younger children.

Also, all the other children received presents—any of the adults might hear a girl singing a beautiful song and give her a necklace, or see a boy create some interesting piece of magic and give him a clockwork toy. Sarah was never special enough to receive gifts. She couldn’t do even the most basic magic, not even baby magic. The adults looked at her dubiously, shook their heads, clicked their tongues.

But one morning trip to the door, she found a red bird’s feather wedged between door and lintel. A cardinal’s feather, she said to herself, pulling it out and stroking the sleek bit of bird-sail. She wondered where she’d heard that word. She tucked it into her pocket and pretended to herself that someone had left it there, that someone had thought she was special enough for a present.

Afterwards, she always looked closely at the edges of the door for more presents.

“Foolish child,” her nursemaid, Nerissa scolded, yanking her into her room one afternoon after she’d disgraced herself in her lessons. “You have no aptitude. Some children adapt, but you, you clumsy thing… It’s that door, binding you. I’ll have to speak to Lord Arthon about this.”

Sarah submitted meekly to having her hair yanked around by the brush, too ashamed and afraid to even think about Nerissa’s harsh words.

The feather, carefully hidden under her mattress had just been joined by a new treasure, one that made her heart leap, though she didn’t know why. It was a piece of paper with a child’s drawing on it, a picture of a girl done in crayon with lopsided yellow pigtails and a pink dress and a great big U of a smile. Something about Nerissa’s tone made her afraid for her picture. She loved it, though it was not drawn well. The feather might have been an accident, but surely, surely, the picture was meant for her?

Later that evening, with Nerissa’s threat and the puzzle of the picture occupying her mind, she stayed till after dark playing in the gardens with her friend Nont. She had been abstracted and tense all evening. Why would someone send her a picture? Surely somebody knew. Surely somebody had answers about that door. Would Nont listen? Would he make fun of her?

As they strolled towards the mansion, Nont, chatting about the game they had played, noticed the darkness and simply waved a casual hand in the air, a beckoning. Instantly hundreds of fireflies flickered up out of the grass around them, and they proceeded down the lawn in a cloud of tiny jewel-lights. Sarah sighed, equally mesmerized by the beauty all around her and ashamed that she could not take part. “I want to go this way.” She pointed down a side path that led away from the mansion. “I think I left my ball over there.”

Nont rolled his eyes. “You did not. You just want to see that stupid door. Why do you like it so much?”

She flushed red, instantly crushed. So Nont would not listen to her. She twitched her shoulders noncommittally, trying too late to look unconcerned. “I don’t know. It doesn’t fit. Like me.”

“You fit just fine. You belong with us. None of us fit at first, but we learned. You just won’t learn. You won’t give up that stupid door. It’s ugly.”

“Can’t you tell I’m not as good as the rest of you?” She burst out. “I can’t stand straight enough, I can’t be graceful, I can’t call fireflies to light my way—”

His lip curled. “You belong here—you have everything you want. How could you be so ungrateful?” She watched his back as he walked away, taking his fireflies with him, and let her shoulders droop the way she couldn’t do around any of them. Not only did she fail at being good and right like everyone else, she even failed at appreciating how much she had.

Because it was no small thing, to live with them. She knew that. Each morning she woke enveloped in the softest covers, to look out her window at a world of magically enhanced natural beauty—trees of silver and gold, iridescent rainbows of fountains sparkling in the air. She wore beautiful dresses. She played late into the night—for all their education during the day, children there were given no other tasks. And at night—at night there were the balls.

The women were dazzling; luminous eyed, wearing clothes of moss and spiderwebs that were richer than any duchess’s gown. The men were tall and strong, wearing clothes studded with precious stones, their red mouths quirked into cruel, beautiful smiles.

And the food at the dances—the food was always good, but when there was a dance the tables were piled with fruit, candies, cakes tarts—Sarah and the other children would hide behind trees and dart out to snatch the food from the tables laid out for the dancers. Not because they were hungry but for the sheer deliciousness of doing the forbidden.

All of this was hers; the privilege of living with them. She tried to set the door aside, but somehow after only one or two days, the craving to see the door, to touch it, to be near whatever was beyond it overwhelmed her, and she would sneak down to it again.

So when Nerissa caught her visiting the door yet again and dragged her up to the top rooms in the place where they lived, Sarah was humiliated. She felt smaller and smaller as her feet sank into the deep pile of the moss-covered hallway leading down to Lord Arthon’s rooms.

It was possible, given Nerissa’s temper, that she was literally enchanting Sarah to be smaller, but if she was, she needn’t have. Sarah was desperately searching her mind for some plausible reason she could have for her impossible, monstrous ingratitude—and finding nothing.

She stood in his room, abandoned there by Nerissa who cast a smug look at her as she left. The glass of the windows was wound into the walls in teardrop shapes, letting light spangle in, refracting and beautiful on the thick green carpet. Gauzy green leaves hung down over the walls and a breeze, as fresh as the breeze in the treetops flowed around her.

He sat in a chair, upright, stern and beautiful, his long hands folded in his lap. “You have everything you could want here.” He said, his rich voice calm, and gentle. And then he left silence, waiting for her to explain herself.

She could not. Some as of yet wordless frustration struggled inside of her but she couldn’t say it. She put her hands on her face to hide the tears.

“The other children are happy.” He said, again leaving the silence to prod her into speech.

“But you don’t love me!” The words were out before she knew they were coming, that they had sat in her mind and heart this whole time. “I’m not good enough. You want to make me like you, and I’m not.”

She wanted to be wrong; she wanted Arthon to scoop her up and exclaim that they did love her, that they only put rules in place to keep her safe, that there was something about that door that was not good for her—but instead, his temper snapped.

There was a roaring as he called up a whirlwind and sent her tumbling backwards, her head smacking against the door so hard her teeth hurt. She screamed in terror, desperately trying to keep hold of her skirts and flailing her limbs as she sprawled into the hallway. “Let that teach you what going against our will is like! Do not question us!” He roared after her, and then the wind slammed the door shut.

It was the answer to her question. They did not love her. And if they didn’t want her to have what was on the other side of that door, then she was going to get it. Even if she had to break down the door with her bare hands.

Very carefully she got to her feet. She wiped her tears off her face with the back of her hand. She smoothed down her dress. She went to her room—filled with crystalline toys that moved and danced and walked like real animals, her closets full of fine dresses. She took the red feather and the picture from under her mattress. She tucked them under her pinafore, and she walked out, down the hallway.

She quietly descended the magnificent winding staircase, through the back parlor, out the doors, and into the garden. She began to hear noises behind her—small, hushed noises, like people were trying to follow her without arousing her suspicion. Somebody whispered.

There it was. The door, weathered, wooden. Utterly unlike the polished world she lived in. There were footsteps behind her, a shout—she began to run. Her feet felt slow and clumsy. This was how it always was in her nightmares—she was running, running, reaching for the door and they swooped in on her—but her hand touched the rough wood—and this time it moved.

It gave way, wrenched open by a small girl in yellow pigtails, her mouth and eyes wide as the older girl barged through.

For a moment, both worlds were visible. The glittering, supernatural beauty of the fairy world behind her and the simplicity of her own bedroom, carpeted floor covered in her sister’s toy horses, her own bed in the corner—and then her sister slammed the door shut and the fairy world was gone.

It was replaced by two soft arms flung around her neck and a voice—a voice she remembered, though it had lisped and stammered when she heard it last—“Sarah! Sarah! You’ve come home!”

And she had her arms around her sister’s neck and they wept tears of joy. The stolen child was home.