I set out to learn everything that could be known about the other Henry Day. My life's story and its telling are bound to his, and only by understanding what had happened to him would I know all that I had missed. My friends agreed to help me, for by our nature we are spooks and secret agents. Because their skills had lain dormant since the botched change with Oscar Love, the faeries took special delight in spying on Henry Day. Once upon a time, he was one of them.
　　Luchóg, Smaolach, and Chavisory tracked him to an older neighborhood on the far side of town where he circled round the streets as if lost. He stopped and talked to two adorable young girls playing with their dollies in their front yard. After watching him drive off, Chavisory approached the girls, thinking they might be Kivi and Blomma in human form. The sisters guessed Chavisory was a faery right away, and she ran, laughing and shrieking, to our hiding place in a crown of blackberry stalks. A short time later, our spies spotted Henry Day talking to a woman who seemed to have upset him. When he left her old house, Henry looked haunted, and he sat in his car for the longest time, head bent to the steering wheel, shoulders heaving as he sobbed.
　　"He looked knackered, as if the woman sapped his spirit," Smaolach told us afterward.
　　"I noticed as well," said Luchóg, "that he has changed of late, as if he is guilty of the past and worried of the future."
　　I asked them if they thought the older woman had been my mother, but they assured me she was somebody else's.
　　Luchóg rolled himself a smoke. "He walked in one man, came out another."
　　Chavisory poked at the campfire. "Maybe there are two of him."
　　Onions agreed, "Or he's only half a man."
　　Luchóg lit the cigarette, let it dangle from his lower lip. "He's a puzzle with one piece missing. He's a tockless clock."
　　"We'll pick the lock of his brain," Smaolach said.
　　"Have you been able to find out more about his past?" I asked them.
　　"Not much," said Luchóg. "He lived in your house with your mother and father, and your two little sisters."
　　"Our Chopin won lots of prizes for playing music," said Chavisory. "There's a tiny shiny piano on the mantel, or at least there was." She reached behind her back and held out the trophy for us to admire, its facade reflecting the firelight.
　　"I followed him to school one day," said Smaolach. "He teaches children how to play music, but if their performance is any indication, he's not very good. The winds blow harsh and the fiddlers cannot fiddle."
　　We all laughed. In time, they told me many more stories of the man, but large gaps existed in the tale, and singular questions arose. Was my mother living still, or had she joined my father under the earth? I knew nothing about my sisters and wondered how they had grown. They could be mothers themselves by now, but are forever babies in my imagination.
　　"Did I tell you he saw us?" Luchóg asked. "We were at our old stomping grounds by his house, and I am sure that he looked right at Chavisory and me. He's not the handsomest thing in the world."
　　"Tell the truth," Chavisory added, "he's rather fearsome. Like when he lived with us."
　　"And old."
　　"And wearing out," said Smaolach. "You're better off with us. Young always."
　　The fire crackled and embers popped, floating up in the darkness. I pictured him snug in his bed with his woman, and the thought reminded me of Speck. I trudged back to my burrow, trying to find comfort in the hard ground.
　　In my sleep, I climbed a staircase of a thousand steps carved into the side of a mountain. The dizzy view below took my breath away, and my heart hammered against my bones. Only blue skies and a few more steps lay in front of me. I labored on and reached the top, and the stairs continued down the other side of the mountain, impossibly steep, even more frightening than the way up. Paralyzed, I could not go back and could not go on. From the side, from nowhere, Speck appeared, joining me on the summit. She had been transformed. Her eyes sparked with life; she grinned at me as if no time had passed.
　　"Shall we roll down the hill together? Like Jack and Jill?"
　　I could not say a word. If I moved, blinked, opened my mouth, she would disappear and I would fall.
　　"It isn't as difficult or dangerous as it appears."
　　She wrapped me in her arms and, next thing, we were safe at the bottom. The dreamscape shifts when she closes her eyes, and I fall deep into a well. I sit alone waiting for something to happen above my head. A door opens, light floods the space. I look up to find Henry Day looking down at me. At first he appears as my father, and then becomes himself. He shouts at me and shakes his fist. The door slams shut, erasing the light. From beneath my feet, the well begins to fill with water flowing in like a river. I kick in panic and realize a strong gossamer rope binds my limbs. Rising to my chest, to my chin, the waters wash over me, and I am under. Unable to hold my breath any longer, I open my mouth and fill my lungs.
　　I woke gasping for breath. A few seconds passed before the stars came into view, the reaching branches, the lips of my burrow an inch or two above my face. Throwing off the blanket, I rose and stepped out of that space onto the surface. Everyone else was asleep in their dens. Where the fire had been, I faint orange glow was visible beneath the black kindling. The starlit woods were so quiet that I could hear the steady breathing of the few faeries left in this place. The chilly air robbed me of my bed-warmth, and a film perspiration dried and evaporated off my skin. How long I stood still, I do not know, but I half expected someone to materialize from the darkness either to take me or to embrace me.
　　
　　
　　I went back to work on my book, stuck mid sentence at the point where Igel is about to switch with little Oscar Love. During my first visit beneath the library, I re-read the pages in light of what we had discovered about Henry Day, and all that had been revealed to me through the other clan members about my former life and circumstances. Needless to say, my first story reeked of false impressions. I gathered my papers and the error-riddled manuscript and thought through the problem. In my original version, I had assumed that my parents lived still and that they had spent their lives missing their only son. Of the few chance encounters with my natural father, only one could possibly be true. And, of course, the first story had been written with no real knowledge of the fraud and imposter who had taken my place.
　　We started watching him again and found a troubled man. He carried on conversations with himself, his lips mouthing a violent argument. Ages ago, he'd had a number of other friends as well, but as his strangeness increased, they vanished from the story. Henry spent most of his time locked away in a room, reading books or playing a booming organ, scrawling notes on lined paper. His wife lived in the margins, working on her home, every day driving away and returning hours later. Onions thought that a telltale unhappiness weighed heavily on the woman's mind, for when she was alone, she often stared into the distance, as if to extract from the air the answer to her unuttered questions. The boy, Edward, was ideal for the change, alone and distanced from the rise and fall of life, caught up in his own thoughts, and wandering through his parents' house as if looking for a friend.
　　Waking in the middle of a full-moon night, I overheard Béka and Onions whispering about the boy. Cozy in their den, they expected a degree of privacy, but their conspiracy hummed along the ground like the faraway sound of an approaching train.
　　"Do you think we'd be able to, ourselves alone?" Onions asked.
　　"If we can catch him at the right moment. Perhaps when the father is distracted or drowning out every known sound on that infernal organ."
　　"But if you change with Edward Day, what will happen to me?" Onions said, never more plaintive. I coughed to alert them to my presence and walked over to where they huddled, feigning sleep, innocent as two newborn kits. They might be brazen enough to try, and I resolved to keep closer watch and crack any plots before one might hatch.
　　In the past, the faeries refused to spy on one who had quit the tribe. The changeling was left alone, forgotten,............