The Changeling

“Mommy, where’s Prudence?”

“Go back to sleep honey?”

“But I can’t find Prudence!”

“Prudence is fine, honey, go back to sleep.”

“But what if he’s hurt?”

Alicia glanced at her son in the rear-view mirror. “If he were hurt, he’d let us know. I’m sure she’s just found somewhere cozy to take a nap.” Rustling from behind her now. Another glance showed Terry moving luggage in a quest for the missing cat. The noise went on for a few minutes, then silence, the bed she had carefully made for Terry out of luggage now turned into a forbidding landscape of hills and mountains. She looked briefly for her son’s shape in the mess, before turning her attention back to the road. It seemed that Terry, too, had found somewhere cozy to take a nap.

An hour later, she follower her husband into the parking lot of a McDonalds, got out of the car, stretched.

“How’s Terry doing?”

She turned to her husband and melted into him. “Sleeping, mostly.” She breathed in the smell of him. Nearly a thousand miles from anything she’d ever known, and she was suddenly at home.

“I’ll get him.”

She held him for a moment longer, before letting him go and sitting back against the hood of the van. He opened trunk of their van then, quietly, “Terry?”

“Terry?”

Alicia moved around to join him soaking into the warmth of his chest. “Come on, Terry, dinner.”

“Terry?”

As one, they moved forward and began to rearrange luggage.

“Terry! Come on buddy, can we skip this?" Their search began to grow frantic.

It was Jack who saw it first. Behind his old school pack, a shimmer. He moved the pack and then stopped, staring, his wife joining him a moment later. There, in the middle of a pile of their luggage, was a disc. It was a perfect circle, though the edges were jagged and uneven. The surface was a dark green and seemed to shimmer.

Jack slowly reached out his hand and the disc bulged out toward him. Jack yanked his hand back.

“Terry!”

Their hands found each-other as Jack reached toward the disc again. This time it nearly leapt at him, engulfing his hand and traveling up his arm. Alicia felt a jerk and he was gone, leaving her sobbing. She broke down for a minute leaning against the frame of the car before, hysterically, reaching for the strange disc that had taken her son and husband. When her hand reached it, it exploded out with sudden violence and she was thrown back across the parking lot, losing consciousness with a jolt as her head hit the pavement. Her husband lay crumpled into a ball a few feet away, bleeding from a thousand tiny cuts.

The local police toyed with the notion of charging Alicia with the death of her husband and son, but relented after receiving a copy of the coroner’s report. There was simply no way that a single person could have inflicted that many wounds before the man died. When the cat was found with similar wounds, the incident was laid at the feet of “Satanists” and grudgingly put to rest. A special ran on the local news.

Terry’s body was never found.