The Changeling’s Revenge
by Roy Dorman
A feeling of unease — no, more a feeling of dread — came over Dr. Edward Donaldson as he sat on a bench in the Newcastleton village square watching the dancers.
An anthropologist recently graduated with honors from the University of Edinburgh, Dr. Donaldson was attending the annual folk festival that took place in this Southern Borders Scottish village.
He scanned the crowd to see if he could determine the cause of this feeling.
On the other side of the square was a farm family; husband, wife, and five young children. Donaldson’s eye came to rest upon one of the children, a boy, who somehow looked out of place in this group.
The boy was staring at Donaldson and had what could only be called a leer on his face. Though he had a somewhat stocky build for a child of eight or ten, it was his eyes that held Donaldson’s attention. There was something ancient lurking behind that gaze.
“My God,” said Donaldson softly, “a changeling.”
The family moved on, and Donaldson immediately felt more at ease.
* * *
Six years would pass before Dr. Donaldson would get the time to attend the Newcastleton festival again. He now had a faculty position at the University of Edinburgh, and teaching and research left precious little time for travel.
He had forgotten the leering farm boy. But in the spring of the year, the topic of changelings in Scottish folklore had come up in his readings and he remembered that farm family he had seen in Newcastleton. Remembering the changeling, he made plans to attend the end of June festival that summer. “It won’t be a holiday,” he said. “It’ll be research.”
* * *
The festival hadn’t changed much. The usual singing, dancing, food vendors, and pints of ale were excitement enough for the mostly rural crowd. There was a sprinkling of big-city folks in attendance as there was every year, but it was the farm population from the surrounding area who enjoyed it the most.
It was the third and final day of the festival before Donaldson saw the family he was looking for.
At first, it appeared the changeling was not with them but, after watching the group for a few minutes, he finally saw him. He was sitting away from the family on a whiskey barrel at the entrance to an alley, and he was staring at Donaldson.
The leer was again on his face and he seemed to be thinking, I know that you know.
When he jumped off the barrel, Donaldson saw that the changeling was a dwarf. His short legs carried him with a swagger to a pretty teenage girl who was standing watching the dancers.
As he walked past her toward his family, he reached up and pinched one of her breasts.
“Ow!” she cried. “You little beast!”
The patriarch of the family strode over and cuffed the changeling upside the head. “Behave yourself in decent company, Rory, or we’ll leave you home next time,” he said.
“Me name is Brownie, you old fart,” said the changeling. “And I’ll come and go as I please. Ye have no power over me.”
Pushing and shoving his way through the crowd, he left the village square.
Donaldson tried to talk to the farm family about “Rory” but was rebuffed. Later, none of the locals at the pub would talk to him, either.
He told himself he would put in for a sabbatical for the spring semester next year and spend some time in the region. Was Rory — or Brownie — a dwarf, or was he one of the wee folk?
* * *
The spring semester started at the end of January, and Dr. Donaldson immediately set off for Newcastleton. Surely there would be people in the village who, for the price of a few pints, would tell him about the history of the wee folk in the area.
He got a nice room at an inn in the center of the village for a decent price. The busy tourist season didn’t really start up until the time of the festival. He had five months to get the people used to him, enough to open up about what he had come for.
He was to find he would need that time. When he inquired about Brownie’s family, he was met with vehemence at every turn. “Why do ya want to know about them?” was the usual reply.
It was too early in the visit to bring up his interest in wee folks, so he lied a bit and told people he had talked to the family at the previous festival. Still, this was met with muttering and grumbling.
After he had been ignored or met with disdain for a few weeks, an old woman at a farmers’ market took him aside and whispered, “If ye knew them, ye can visit them in the cemetery. That’s where they be takin’ their rest now.”
Donaldson had passed the cemetery a number of times on his walks and knew where it was.
* * *
The following morning he packed a lunch and started off to the cemetery. As an anthropologist, he knew cemeteries oftentimes contained a wealth of historical data. He brought paper and charcoal to make rubbings if he found headstones of particular interest.
The cemetery had many old graves, and though old graves always interested him, Donaldson was looking for new ones this morning. He walked the paths between the headstones and finally came to a set of graves with new earth by their stones.
He had found the farm family. There were six markers; two large stones for the adults and smaller stones for the children.
Gavin and Bonnie Campbell were laid to rest with Ian, Fiona, Kyle, Lorna, and..., but where was Rory? Why wasn’t the changeling with them?
Donaldson removed his hat and got down on one knee before Gavin Campbell’s stone. “Where’s Rory?” he whispered. “Is Rory the reason you are all here before your time?”
“I’m up here, Doc. And you’re right as rain; it was me who did them in.”
Turning around and looking up too quickly, Donaldson wound up falling on his backside in the grass. On a branch in a tree above him sat Rory, or Brownie, as he wanted to be called.
“I knew you’d come here sooner or later,” said Brownie. “I knew from the first day I saw ya years ago we’d knock heads sometime down the road.”
“What did you do?” said Donaldson. “Who or what are you?”
“Got lotsa questions, don’t ya? Last fall, I’d had enough of bein’ pushed around by that ignorant human. He thought he was my father and owned me.
“One evening, when they were all in the barn gettin’ the animals settled in, I barred the doors and set the place on fire. When some of ’em tried to get out through the windows, I forced ’em back with a pitchfork. Ya shoulda heard the screamin’.
“As to who or what I am, I was put into that family by the wee folk, my real folk, in exchange for the couple’s firstborn. Nobody ever guessed it. Nobody but you, maybe, right?”
At the foot of the tree, Donaldson now saw someone listening to the exchange. It was the teenage girl — now more a young woman — he had seen at the fair last summer. She was listening, but her head was down.
“Bridget!” Brownie yelled, jumping from the branch. “Come say hello to the professor here.”
Bridget woodenly walked over and stood before Donaldson.
“You and Bridget are the only humans I allow to see me since the fire,” said Brownie. “She’ll be my wife until I tire of her and go back to the wee folk. Isn’t that right, my dear? Let’s see your smile, there’s a good girl.”
Bridget looked up and nodded numbly. A pained smile formed on her lips, but her eyes showed the horror she lived with. There was a pleading in them that Donaldson felt compelled to act upon.
“This dwarf appearance is a glamour I wove as a baby years ago to disguise my true identity. Humans would not be able to look upon my true likeness for long without going mad.
“The glamour slipped once just for a second when Bridget and I were in the throes of passion, and she hasn’t been quite right since, have you, my pet?”
Brownie reached up and took Bridget’s chin in one hand and moved it back and forth in negation. A single tear rolled down her check and stopped when it reached Brownie’s hand.
“Ow!” he screamed. “I’ve told you about human tears; they burn!”
Donaldson had done his research before this visit but had not heard about wee folk’s aversion to human tears. He did know they could be killed with cold iron and made plans in his head to visit the local farm implement store if Newcastleton had one.
Brownie must be killed and Bridget freed.
* * *
The clerk at the farm implement store had helped Donaldson find a sharp piece of cold iron. Donaldson had told the clerk he needed something strong and sharp to clean some packed dirt from a floor he was refinishing. The piece was a part of a hay baler and was just the right size.
Returning to his room at the inn that evening, he was surprised to find the old woman from the farmers’ market sitting on his bed.
“I came to warn ye,” she said. “There are some young hotheads in the town who don’t like outsiders askin’ questions. It’d be best if you called quits to the Campbell business and went back to where you came from.”
“I do thank you, but I can take care of—”
“Bridget!” the old woman hissed. “I told ye to wait in the alley.”
Donaldson turned to see Bridget standing just inside the door and a little behind him.
“I can smell cold iron nearby,” said the old woman with a sneer. “Ye be even more of a fool than I thought if ye think ye know how to use that.”
The iron was in brown paper bag and Donaldson had put it on top of the dresser inside the door when he came in. Though the room was small, he was still three steps from the iron. He took care not to turn and look at it so as not to give its location away.
“”Bridget! Ye still be here? I told ye to get out!” said the old woman. She then turned back to face Donaldson.
Donaldson had seen the old woman’s guise slip when she yelled at Bridget. There had been a brief glimpse of what lay beneath that thin veneer: Brownie and something worse. The old woman who had sent him to the cemetery was surely dead.
Then, with a speed Donaldson hadn’t thought her capable of, Bridget grabbed the cold iron, bag and all, and thrust one sharp end into Brownie’s throat.
He had time for one quick gasp, the old woman guise’s slipping to reveal a horrible beast, and then he lay back on the bad with the iron still lodged in his throat.
Bridget stepped forward and a hellish amount of dark green projectile vomit flew from her throat onto the outstretched Brownie. There was a hideous scream — he apparently hadn’t been dead yet — and then his body melted and joined with the vomit on the bed.
Bridget looked at Donaldson as if seeing him for the first time. “Who are you? Where am I?” she asked.
The smell in the small room had become overpowering. Donaldson led Bridget outside to the picnic tables on the inn’s lawn.
“Please sit down,” he said. “You’ve recently been through a lot, and it appears you may not have memory of it. That is very good, actually, because those memories could haunt you for the rest of your life. You’re safe now.”
Bridget looked doubtful, but her eyes had lost the pain Donaldson had seen in them when he had seen her in the cemetery.
“I can’t explain it, but I feel..., I feel so very clean,” she said. “It’s like something evil that had been in me has been washed away. Is that what you’re talking about?
“Yes. You should come with me to Edinburgh, at least for a while,” said Donaldson. “There are people, places, and things in Newcastleton that could trigger those bad memories. It would be best to start a new life in a new city.”
* * *
Donaldson and Bridget were sitting in their living room, reading. They were newlyweds, married just three weeks ago, and were enjoying the quiet and the view on a beautiful fall day.
Donaldson was reading an old volume he had found in the stacks of the university’s library. The book was a collection of folk tales regarding the history of the wee folk in England, Scotland, Ireland, and Wales.
Suddenly there was a loud thumping noise at one of the windows of the sliding glass doors that opened to the patio. Bridget and Donaldson both looked up at the same time to see a bluebird flopping around on the cement porch. It had apparently flown into the window and now lay dying.
Donaldson was about to say something about this to Bridget when she let out with a giggle. She quickly stifled it when she saw the look of puzzlement on Donaldson’s face.
She shrugged her shoulders and went back to her reading.
Donaldson sat for a minute staring at the bird. He then went back a few pages looking for a passage he had read earlier.
“At death, especially at violent deaths, the spirits of wee folk become stronger rather than weaker, and will make an attempt to incorporate themselves into a nearby healthy host. In the planning of the killing of one of the wee folk, one must be quick and final. If they are not killed immediately with the first attempt, their spirit will almost certainly enter the body of their murderer soon after their own physical body dies.”
A feeling of dread very much like the feeling he had felt that very first festival day in Newcastleton years ago now settled into Donaldson. He set the book down and walked over to where Bridget was sitting. She looked up at him as he looked down at her. His gorge rose and he fought the urge to vomit. He had seen through her guise.
A tear formed in one of his eyes and dropped onto her bare arm.
“Ow!” she cried. A brief, malevolent stare slipped out before she was able to compose herself.
“Sorry,” said Donaldson, and he turned to leave the room.
“Where are you going, dear?” said Bridget.
“I need to get something at the hardware store,” said Donaldson. “I shan’t be long.”
Copyright © 2018 by Roy Dorman
