Despite being underwater for a day, the body was identified as that of young Oscar Love. The sheet pulled back, the shocking bloat of the drowned, and sure enough, it was him, although the truth is, none of us could bear to look closely. Had it not been for the strange netting around the waterlogged corpse, maybe no one would have thought it anything other than a tragic accident. He would have been laid to rest under two yards of good earth, and his parents left to their private grief. But suspicions were raised from the moment that they gaffed him from the river. The corpse was transported twelve miles to the county morgue for a proper autopsy and inquest. The coroners searched for cause but found only strange effects. To all outward appearance he was a young boy, but when they cut him open, the doctors discovered an old man. The weirdness never made the papers, but Oscar later told me about the atrophied internal organs, the necrosis of the heart, the dehydrated lungs, liver, kidneys, spleen, and brain of a death-defying centenarian.
　　The strangeness and sorrow surrounding this discovery were compounded by the vanishing act of Jimmy Cummings. With the rest of the searchers, he had gone into the woods that night but had not returned. When Jimmy did not show up at the hospital, we all assumed he had gone home early or found another exit, and not until the next evening did George begin to worry. By the third day, the rest of us were all anxious about Jimmy, desperate for any news. We planned to go back to the woods that evening if the weather held, but just as I sat down with my family for dinner, the phone rang in the kitchen. Elizabeth and Mary both sprang from their chairs, hoping a boy might be trying to reach them, but my mother ordered them to sit.
　　"I don't like your friends calling in the middle of meals." Mom picked up the receiver from its cradle on the wall, and after she said hello, her face was a palette of surprise, shock, disbelief, and amazement. She half turned to finish her discussion, leaving us to stare at the back of her head. As she hung up the phone with her left hand, she crossed herself with her right, then turned to share the news.
　　"It's a miracle. That was Oscar Love. Jimmy Cummings is okay, and he found him alive."
　　My sisters stopped mid-bite, their forks suspended in the air, and stared at her. I asked my mother to repeat the message, and in so doing, she realized the implications of her sentences.
　　"They walked out of the woods together. He's alive. He found him in a hole. Little Oscar Love."
　　Elizabeth's fork fell and clattered on the plate.
　　"You're kidding. Alive?" Mary said.
　　"Far out," said Elizabeth.
　　Distracted, Mom fretted with the bobby pins at her temples. She stood behind her chair, thinking.
　　"Isn't he dead?" I asked.
　　"Well ... there must be a mistake."
　　"That's a helluva mistake, Mom," Mary said.
　　Elizabeth asked the not-so-rhetorical question we were all wondering about. "So who's that in the morgue?"
　　Mary asked her twin, "There's another Oscar Love? That's so cool."
　　My mother sat hard in the chair. Staring at the plate of fried chicken, she seemed lost in abstraction, reconciling what she knew to be true with what she had just heard. The twins one-upped each other with hypotheses too absurd to believe. Too nervous to eat, I retired to the porch for a smoke and contemplation. On my second Camel, I heard the noise of an approaching car. A cherry red Mustang veered off the road and barreled up our drive, kicking up gravel and fishtailing to a stop. The twins rushed out to the porch, the screen door slapping shut twice, before Cummings got out of the car. Hair pulled back into a ponytail, a pair of rose-colored glasses perched on his nose, he flashed the two-finger V and broke into a broad grin. Mary and Elizabeth greeted him with their own peace signs and smiled coyly back at him. Jimmy loped across the yard, took the porch stairs in two bounds, and stood directly in front of me, expecting a hero's welcome. We shook hands.
　　"Welcome back from the dead, man."
　　"Man, you know already? Have you heard the news?" His eyes were bloodshot, and I could not tell if he was drunk or stoned or just worn-out.
　　Mom burst through the door and threw her arms around my friend, bear-hugging him until his face turned red. Not able to restrain themselves a moment longer, my sisters joined in, nearly tackling him in their enthusiasm. I watched them unpeel one by one.
　　"Tell us all about it," my mother said. "Would you like a drink? Let me get you an iced tea."
　　While she busied herself in the kitchen, we arranged ourselves on the rattan. Unable to decide upon a sister, Jimmy slumped onto the settee, and the twins bunched together on the porch swing. I kept my post at the railing, and when she returned, Mom sat beside Jimmy, beaming at him as if he were her own son.
　　"Have you ever seen anyone come back from the dead, Mrs. Day?"
　　"Oh, angels and ministers of grace defend us."
　　"That's what the Loves thought when they saw him," Jimmy said. "As if Oscar might have come from the airs of heaven, or been blasted out of hell. They couldn't believe what their own eyes were telling them. 'Cause they were all set to take the body to the funeral home, thinking Little Oscar was dread and fit to be buried, when I come in with their son, holding his hand, Lewis looked as if he was having a heart attack, man, and Libby walked up and said, 'Are you real? Can I touch you? What are you? Can you speak to me?' And the boy ran to her and wrapped his arms around her waist, and she knew he was no ghost."
　　Two identical beings, one dead, the other living—the changeling and the child.
　　"All the doctors and nurses freaked out, too. Speaking of nurses, Henry, there's a nurse there who said she saw you the other night when they brought up that other boy."
　　That was no boy.
　　"Lew starts shaking my hand, and Libby says 'Bless you' about a thousand times. And Oscar, big Oscar, came in a few minutes later, then he goes through the whole routine with his nephew, and man, is he glad to see me, too. The questions start flying, and of course I already told the whole story to the firemen and the cops. They brought us to the hospital on account of him being out there for three days. Near as they can tell, there isn't a thing wrong with the boy. A little strung out, like he'd been tripping, and we were pretty tired and dirty and thirsty."
　　A big storm darkened in the western skies. In the forest, the creatures would be scrambling for cover. The hobgoblins had created an underground warren in their ancient campsite, a maze of tunnels that sheltered them from the rough weather.
　　"But you had to know, man, so I got in my ride and drove right over here."
　　He drank his iced tea in a single gulp, and my mother refilled his glass at once. She, like the rest of us, grew anxious for the beginning, and I was wondering if his story would beat the rain. No longer able to wait, she asked, "So, how did you find little Oscar?"
　　"Hey, Henry, did I tell you that I saw that nurse, Tess Wodehouse? You should give her a call, bro. That night, I got so caught up looking for that kid that I lost track of the time. My watch stopped dead around half past seven. Which freaked me out because it must have been after nine. Not that I believe in ghosts or anything like that, just that it was dark."
　　I checked my watch and studied the approaching storm, trying to calculate its tempo. If one or two of them were away from camp when the rain hit, they would have to look for a cave or a hollow tree to wait out the worst.
　　"So I was really, really lost. And at that point, I'm concerned about finding my own way out. I come to this clearing in the woods, and it's starlit and spooky. There's these mooshed-down places in the grass and leaves, like maybe deer bed down there. Then I see these flat ovals in a ring around the edges of the clearing, and I figure this is where a herd sleeps for the night, right?"
　　On fair summer nights, we slept above ground. We read the skies each morning for any hint of foul weather. As Jimmy paused for a breath, I thought I heard the notes from the stones in the river again.
　　"There's this circle of ashes and burnt sticks from a campfire that some freakin' hunters or backp............