The Child Thief

THE SPONGY GROUND gave way to asphalt and the Mist began to thin.
The sun could be seen crawling up behind the buildings, and the sounds of
the awakening city echoed down the long avenues of South Brooklyn. The
Mist slid back into the sea, its swirling, sparkling mass dissipating, leaving
Peter standing alone.
The child thief pulled his hood up and headed toward a distant cluster of
bleak tenant buildings. A sign, covered in graffiti, proclaimed the complex
to be the pride of the Brooklyn City Housing Commission. Peter understood
none of the political implications of that sign, but he knew about slums and
ghettoes; such squalid, impoverished places had always been fertile hunting
grounds. The buildings were larger now, the accents and dress different, but
the faces were the same destitute faces of centuries ago: the despair of the
forgotten old, and the grim hostility of the futureless young. A breeding
ground for troubled youth, sometimes too troubled. But time was short and
Avalon needed more children; he would take his chances.
The child thief entered the housing complex through the back
alleyways, sticking to the shadows, his keen senses alert for the dispirited
and desperate, the abandoned and abused, for the lost child. Because lost

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children needed someone to trust, needed a friend, and Peter was good at
making friends.
He shimmied up a drainpipe and dropped onto a balcony cluttered with
garbage bags. He situated himself beneath a rain-sodden sheet of plywood
and waited for the boys and girls to come out and play. As he waited, an
odor permeated his nostrils, every bit as offensive as the sour rot of the
garbage. It was the musky smell of grown-ups: their sweat, their gastric
utterances, their dandruff-ridden scalps, greasy pimple-pocked skin, wax-
encrusted ears, hemorrhoid-infested rumps. He wrinkled his nose. It hadn’t
changed since the day he was born—over fourteen hundred years ago.
He could vividly recall that day: the crushing pressure as his watery
sanctuary strove to eject him, fighting to remain, a feeling not unlike
drowning, sliding from his mother’s womb, cold hard hands clamping about
his legs and tugging him into the world, the blurry, dazzling brightness, the
numbing cold, the shock as someone slapped him across his bottom, the
fury and frustration as he wailed at the blurry blob holding him, and their
booming laughter.
Then he was wiped down and passed to other hands, gentle, caressing
hands that crushed him against warm, milk-swollen bosoms. Someone
covered him in a blanket heated by the fireside and he began to suckle. The
milk had been sweet, and the woman had begun to hum a soft lullaby. Peter
fell into the sweetest sleep he would ever know.
The smells of grown-ups had not been offensive then, not when mixed
with the spice of that large, communal roundhouse: the smoky aromas from
the great fireplace, salted meats and honey mead, roasted potatoes and
boiled cabbage, the musty scent of the two wolfhounds, stale bedding hay,
the sharp tang of fresh-cut spruce hanging from the ceiling beams. But what
made it all so harmonious to his nostrils was the ever-pervasive smell of his
mother, that warm, sweet milk smell that to him would always be the smell
of love.
His eyes were amber then, with only the faintest specks of gold, and his
ears—though oddly shaped—had yet to develop their pointed tips. Other
than a particularly lush head of reddish hair, he looked like any other cupid-
faced newborn.
Peter wintered the first several weeks of his life either in his mother’s
arms or in the great wicker basket by the hearth. His mother’s face was lost

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to him now, but not her grass-green eyes, nor the glow of her bright red
hair.
His mother was never far, singing to him while she wove wool and
mended tunics with her two golden-haired sisters. He slept away most of his
day, dreamily watching his large family go about their daily routines: the
two men and oldest boy leaving before dawn to hunt, the younger boys
tending the sheep and gathering wood, the old bent man and his old bent
wife going about their chores as long as the daylight would allow. At sunset
the hunters would return, and with the thick stone walls between them and
the winter wind, the family would gather around the rough-hewn oak table
for their evening meal.
Day after day, Peter lay there watching and listening. Before long, he
could make out words, then whole sentences. When he was three weeks old,
he understood most everything said around him.
Each night, before dinner, his mother would nurse him, wrap him in his
blanket, and leave him in the large basket near the hearth to sleep while the
family ate. But Peter didn’t sleep; he watched and listened as they laughed
and joked, cursed and argued, encouraged and consoled, as they shared the
good and the bad of their days. And when they would laugh, he would
smile, and the tiny specks of gold in his eyes would sparkle, for the sound
of their mirth was a sweet song to his ears.
One night, on the evening of his seventh week in the world, Peter
decided he was done just watching, that he wished to join in. So he kicked
his legs free of the blanket, sat up, and climbed over the side of his basket.
His legs gave out from under him and he landed on his bare bottom with a
solid thump. What’s wrong with my legs, he wondered; it had never dawned
on him that he couldn’t yet walk. Everyone else could. He pulled up onto
wobbly legs and steadied himself on the rim of the basket. He looked out
across the room. Suddenly the table seemed a long way off.
He took a tentative step, fell, pulled himself up and tried again. This
time he didn’t fall. He took another step, another, then let go of the basket
and began to waddle his way across the room. By the sixth and seventh step
he was toddling toward the table, his face rapt in concentration.
The old man spotted him first. His jaw hung open in mid-chew and a
clump of potato rolled out of his mouth and bounced off the table. The old
lady frowned and swatted the old man. He let out a cry and jabbed a bony
finger at Peter.

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They all turned in time to see the naked infant stroll up to the table.
Peter, delighted to have his family’s full attention, put his small, chubby
hands on his hips and grinned boldly—the gold flecks in his eyes now
positively gleaming. When no one spoke, when no one did more than let out
a high-pitched wheeze, Peter asked, “Can I join you?” But this being the
first time he’d put words together, it came out more like “an I oin ouu?”
He frowned at the odd sound of his own voice. The words hadn’t come
out right and the alarmed and astonished looks confronting him confirmed
this. His tiny brow furrowed and he tried again. “Can I join you?” he said,
much clearer. Then, with confidence, he said, “Can I join you? Can I?”
He looked expectantly from face to face. Surely that was right? Yet still
they stared at him with those wide, startled eyes. If anything, he thought,