I recall, almost word for word, the telephone call which had informed me that Laney had disappeared: her teacher, calm, unbearable, all saccharine platitudes and reassurance, my own voice fraught and strangled with an instant and instinctual panic.

At that time I had only just emerged, inwardly bruised and outwardly haggard, from a two year custody battle with my ex husband, who had dogged me through the courts not out of any particular interest in Laney, whom he had always handled with a stranger's cold unfeeling, but to harangue me to the point I felt half-mad, my penance for refusing to yield to the man’s more violent torments.

Our daughter was the only beautiful thing that I had gleaned from our decade together, and I cleaved to her— my prize, my love—with such ferocity that each time I dropped her off at school in the morning I would sit in the parking lot and shake with a passionate dread of anything happening to her in the hours she was not in my care.

All parents know the power of imagined horrors: the kidnapper idling on every corner in the sinister white shell of a van, the teacher alone in a vacant classroom, the husband with quick and vicious fists loitering at the school gates to whisk the unwitting child away.

All these things and more cavorted my mind in a grim and raucous glee as I answered the call from Laney's teacher, knowing with the psychic sureness of any mother that Something Was Wrong.

"It's alright, Ms Cameron," said Miss Paxton, whom I'd always found to be an insipid and distinctly useless character. "I'm sure Laney just wandered off and got a little confused trying to find her way back to the group. The park rangers are all out looking for her. I'm sure she'll be found in no time at all."

It was all I could do not to scream a dozen accusatory questions down the line.

How could you lose her? Isn't it your job to take care of the class? Don't you know that there are savage animals, and deep water, and steep drops out there in the wilderness? Haven't you thought about that the way I have, agonised like I have, suffered and yearned to save the innocent from all the colours of horror in the world?

"She's only ten years old, for God's sake," I snapped, through gritted teeth. "She must be terrified."

Yet even as I said it I knew the most dangerous thing was that Laney wouldn't be frightened at all.

She had always been a placid, adventurous child, undeterred from her exploratory whims by scratches and bruises, nor by being separated from me, or any other guardian.

I recall losing her in a shopping mall at the heights of the festive season, finding her—after three hours of tearful searching—by a water fountain, tossing nickels she'd found in one lint filled pocket down into the verdigris depths.

"Hi, Mom," Laney had said, her blonde eyebrows raised with a cool, adult surprise at my distress. "I'm making a wish. Think it'll come true?"

Through luck and my meticulous care nothing truly terrible had ever happened to my daughter. No wonder, then, that she could not conceive of herself at the centre of such an event; disaster was, to Laney, a distant fairy tale, the Rumpelstiltskin that only came for other children, of another time.

Yet these ills had indeed now taken her, and as I languished by the phone awaiting another call I pictured a thousand scenarios, each more sickening than the last.

It didn't help matters that the National Park in which Laney had disappeared was notorious for missing persons reports and other unsavoury incidents, many of which were quietly supressed from local news. I had, of course, vehemently opposed the school's decision to include a visit to the area as part of the new curriculum, appalled to find myself bullied into acquiescence by principal and board alike.

Thus, upon finding my neurosis vindicated, I could only logically assume that my grislier fantasies would be confirmed in a like fashion. I was no retentive paranoiac, the hysteric archetype of the crumbling woman: looking back, I might argue my suspicions were but pangs of psionic foresight, a sense that would step forth from shadowed peripheries in the following days, and make itself their heart.

Smoking cigarette after cigarette in fractious helplessness I envisioned, darkly, the face of Laney's father upon receiving the news of her death, like the mask of some malevolent pagan God. He'd sup greedily from the liquor of my grief, the denouement of his daughter’s existence nothing to him but a tool to eviscerate a reaction from me.

Then, suddenly, the phone rang again, causing me to jump so violently that I spilled ash down the front of my dress.

"Good news, Ms Cameron. Laney turned up, and she's just fine."

I pressed a hand to my mouth, unsure whether I was going to vomit or burst into tears.

"What happened?" I asked. "Where did you find her?"

There was an odd little laugh on the other end of the line.

"Well, it's sort of strange," said Miss Paxton. "One of the rangers found her at the bottom of a seven foot hole in a meadow— it looked to be a burrow of some kind. Lord knows what made it. Laney must have just fallen in by accident. We've looked her over, and luckily she doesn't have even a scratch on her. If you'd like to pick her up she's fine to go home. As I said, she's not injured, just a little shaken up, is all."

I got into my car and drove the hour long journey to the park, so soaked in the adrenaline of relief that I was like a dreamer, watching my white hands curl in spidering husks upon the wheel.

When I pulled up to the park ranger's station an officer was loitering out front beside Miss Paxton, who was holding the hand of a small blonde child with a firmness that suggested it might run away from her the moment she let go. The little figure stood with its back to me, short-haired and androgynous as an elf, staring off into the forest, as though watching something move in the trees.

The other kids milled about nearby, their eyes flat and aloof. I noticed they gave the light-haired child a wide berth, which, had it been Laney, would have been strikingly unusual, being that she made friends easily, and was close to a group of five other girls in her class. Not one of them looked at or spoke to her, loitering at the vertices of the clearing, whispering amongst themselves

As I got out of the car I saw the blonde child twist at Miss Paxton's arm, attempting to dislodge itself and wander off into the woods. Although the hair was right, and it was wearing a similar outfit to that which I'd set out for Laney that morning, nothing in its body language was reminiscent of my daughter, whose loose-shouldered, tomboyish posture I would have recognised at once.

Was there some mistake? Had this idiot of a teacher somehow confused Laney with some other, unknown child?

Miss Paxton turned towards me with a welcoming smile, which wavered as she caught my expression. The thin little child-stranger swivelled awkwardly on her arm, still wanting to go in the other direction.

"Laney," said the teacher, brightly. "Look! Your mom's here."

She spoke as she might to an infant, and from this I gleaned there was something amiss she hadn't deigned to tell me over the phone. Pressing a hand to the small of the child's back, she ushered it forwards, and at last its face turned towards me, no more familiar than its posture had been.

I suppose the girl looked enough like Laney that anyone might mistake them at a passing glance, but that was all. This child's eyes were spaced further apart, the mouth small and cruel, the nose thinner, and missing the aquiline shape she inherited from me; it was as though Laney's own face had been drawn from memory, and a poor one at that.

Cousins they could easily be, but the same child they were not, and I was amazed that the teacher that saw her five days a week could possibly think them identical.

It was as I glanced up into the young woman's shifting eyes behind her glasses that I realised she didn't believe it, not really. Now it seems to me that what she perceived was so beyond her understanding that she had simply elected to place her trust in the most logical explanation, yet not the correct one.

Then, however, I merely assumed that she was lying to me for some nefarious purpose, and found myself coolly unsurprised. The world had always seemed set against me and my daughter; why, then, would the person entrusted to care for my only child be any different?

"What is this?" I asked, harshly. "Where's Laney?"

Miss Paxton's face drained of colour, and she stammered through a few brittle sentence starters, unable to finish even one. The girl that wasn't my daughter twitched and fussed in her grip, her pale eyes as indifferent to my presence as the sea to the swimmer it drowns.

I was both repelled and fascinated by her, this tiny usurper held against her will.

"Ms Cameron," said the ranger. “Talk with me in the station a second.”

She was a thin, short-haired woman, hard with corded muscle, and speaking in the sharp, almost Germanic accent that was common to some of the nearby towns.

I wanted to refuse the ranger’s offer, rally angrily against her with all the obstinance my fear and anguish could lend me. But in the end I went after her, looking back over my shoulder at the unfamiliar child, who flinched and jolted at the end of the school teacher's arm like a condemned man in a rain of artillerant fire.

The ranger, whose name was Dianne Becker, sat me down in a rickety chair and brewed me a cup of coffee so black that I almost retched at the first swig.

"Who is that kid out there?" I asked. "She isn't my daughter. Was it you that found her?"

"My colleague," said Becker, flatly. "She's off shift. I'll get you her number if you wanna talk to her. But anyway, I was there when Mel brought the kid back to the station. Had this with her. The teacher recognised it."

The ranger picked up a purple, rainbow print backpack from a nearby desk and pushed it towards me, watching blandly as I touched the name tag and ferreted through the contents— the workbooks with their untidy handwriting, the uneaten packed lunch, the pencil case, whose utensils were all nibbled surreptitiously at their ends.

"It's your daughter's?" asked Becker, with the intonation of a statement.

"Yes," I said, reluctantly. "But it doesn't matter. That girl out there? I've never seen her before in my life. Laney is still missing."

Becker regarded me without expression.

"So you're saying a kid turned up with your daughter's description, wearing her clothes, carrying her stuff... but it ain't your daughter?"

I knew how it sounded, but hearing it echoed back in that detached monotone made me want to scream out in frustration. Instead I pulled my cell phone from my pocket and shoved it at Becker, stabbing my finger at photographs and video clips of Laney as the ranger looked on with cool, dispassionate eyes.

"Look," I said. "That's my baby. That's what she looks like. That's her face. That girl your colleague picked up— they're not the same, can't you see that? And the kids in Laney's class: none of them know who she is, either. Why are you lying to me? What's going on?"

But Becker only shrugged, her weathered face an impenetrable slab.

"I don't know what to tell you, Ma'am," she said. "I'm not seeing the difference."

I pinched the bridge of my nose, holding back the threatened tears.

"I'm not crazy, okay? There's been some kind of mix up. That girl's parents are probably frantic, looking for her."

Becker shrugged.

"Haven't heard anything about that. Only missing kid this week is yours."

The helplessness I felt as I stared at the ranger was of such intensity that my vision swam like a desert heat at the edges, a white and crystalline blindness. Becker clearly noticed something amiss in my face, for she shoved the cooling coffee cup towards me and placed a coarse palm on my shoulder.

"If you think something's wrong maybe you ought to take the kid to a doctor," she said, gently. "Get her looked over, you know?”

Likely Becker thought me unstable, in shock, caught up in the sort of excitement that would die down in a day or two. There was nothing I could say to prove or defend myself, I saw that clearly.

I stood up from the table, seizing Laney's backpack in a wretched burst of anger.

"She is not my daughter," I said, again. "When I get to the bottom of this you'll hear about it, make no mistake."

For all my bluster I was hyperventilating as I shoved my way back out into the clearing again, every breath sawing up through my side like an animal bite.

I don't remember how I went from this pitiful state to sitting with the strange child in the back of the car, driving mechanically along the road; I only recall staring at the little creature in the rear view mirror, looking desperately for something of Laney in its pale, furtive eyes, its twitching person, finding nothing.

There was no recognition in the sharp little features, no understanding of where it was, or what it was doing. I saw it wrestle with the seatbelt like a dog against its collar, put one grubby hand against the passenger window, as though expecting it to slip right through into the air beyond. I couldn't fathom where so wild and capricious and unthinking a child might have sprung from, and despaired that through the stupidity of others it had been thrust upon me.

Through a great amount of wheedling and pressure I was able to wrangle an emergency check up appointment with Laney's paediatrician, a weary middle-aged woman who'd handled my daughter's case so many times over the past five years I had no doubt that she, at least, would recognise the grave mistake that had been made when I presented her with the little stranger.

It was a trial cajoling the child out of the car into the doctor's office. It only glared with a beady, crow-like malice and attempted to dart past me, prevented only by my hand at its elbow. The arm was all sinew and bone beneath its jacket, soft as twigs under wet leaves; I gave a short cry of disgust, and forced myself to cling on, lest the child flee across the parking lot and into the busy road.

While not Laney, it was a little girl, and my maternal instinct to protect life still remained. I kept the stranger close to my side as I pushed it through the office door, wrinkling my nose at the scent of dirt and wet grass that lingered on the child's hair and clothes.

I'm not sure what I anticipated upon presenting it to Dr Maddox— arched eyebrows, perhaps, asking where Laney was, if I was caring for a young relative for the day. Yet there was no such surprise, only the usual greeting and tepid professionalism with which she carried out every appointment.

As per my request she enacted a full body examination, including of the teeth— I had some notion, from true crime media, that the identity of the stranger might be unearthed that way.

The child was obstinate throughout, not with aggression so much as an aversion to touch, writhing about with a lithe, ferrety determination. I dithered, unsure whether to feel embarrassed or disconcerted.

The doctor seemed unsurprised by the display, however, going about her work with prosaic method. Only when the child was allowed to slip from the examination table and hunch, all elbows and knees, in one corner did Dr Maddox take me aside for a hushed conversation.

"Ms Cameron, why did you bring Laney in to see me today?' she asked, in tones of brittle neutrality.

The truth would sound akin to madness; aware of this, I only said, "I was wondering if you'd noticed a... physical difference in Laney, since you last saw her."

Dr Maddox glanced at the child, who stared out of a nearby window, observing a small bird cleaning its wings in a tree.

"It's not her physical health that worries me," she said. "The behavioural changes, however— the mutism, the restlessness. I have to ask: has anything... new happened at home?"

This being a delicate, euphemistic reference to the divorce, to Laney's father.

"Not at home, no," I said, carefully. "Earlier today there was an incident on a school trip. Laney wandered off, had some kind of accident. She's been like this since then. Not talking, doesn't respond to anything I or anyone else says. She's totally changed. It doesn't make sense."

Dr Maddox made a sound of gentle understanding, and in it I lost all hope of support, of being heard,

"Sometimes it's the little things that trigger a reaction that's built up from earlier incidents," she said. "A delayed reaction. It may seem sudden, but all things considered it makes sense. I can recommend a psychologist to look into this better than I can."

I imagined the child crouching, silent and unpleasant as a hobgoblin, while I was pressured into lying to another clueless professional.

"No," I said. "No, thank you. Not today."

Ignoring the concern in Dr Maddox's eyes, I turned to the stranger we were pretending was Laney. Inexplicably it struck me that perhaps it was not even a child at all– an unsettling thought, bidden from the oddness and mystery of the circumstances, yet one that lingered, all the same.

"Come on," I said to it, in a hoarse voice.

The child's head twitched, but it only continued its watch of the window, its thin mouth slightly ajar. Then, as I reached towards it the head turned, and I thought for one hideous moment that it was going to bite my arm with its perfect little teeth.

I froze, not knowing what to do, too frightened and too appalled by the thought to strike it, too stunned to move away.

At last the child stood, and when I stepped towards the door it followed, allowing me, with a short twitch, to take its clammy hand, little though I wanted to.

It was in the parking lot that I had my first truly unkind thought towards the stranger. Not of harming it, merely of leaving the child there, where it would be found, and driving away.

But I knew it was impossible. I'd be arrested for child abandonment and endangerment, institutionalised, perhaps. There would be no end to my accountability, for I could not defend myself when the only other being that might have spoken in my favour had uttered not one word, nor seemed remotely capable of doing so.

So it was that I took the little stranger home, feeling more resentful of her presence—of her replacing Laney—with every passing minute.

I ended up cooking something for dinner with the stiff, mindless process of an automaton, caring little whether or not the child would like what I set on its plate.

It would neither sit at the table nor consider the cutlery, squatting behind one of the chairs to look at me through the slats, its face spliced into irregular oblongs by each wooden spoke. The effect of this was that I could imagine even less how the individual pieces could ever come together to resemble Laney's features, each of an unnatural difference from hers.

"Who are you?" I hissed, across the now gelid dinner. "Where is my daughter? Why are you here, and not her?"

The child slid away from the chair and against the back door, scuffling like a hound plagued by worms.

"Alright," I said, sharply, standing up from my place with a screech of chair legs upon tiles. "Go outside. Play. Something."

I unlocked the door and ushered the stranger out across the back yard, relieved that it went out without event, allowing me my first moment alone.

The inescapable bind of my situation overwhelmed me, and again I collapsed into my chair, leaden as a coin dropped into some fathomless well.

I missed Laney terribly, thinking forlornly what a beautiful, simple afternoon it would be if she were still here, kicking her dirty sneakers off under the table with a sighing affectation of grown-up tiredness. She would have shown me a rock or flower she'd found on her trip—which I would pretend a dutiful fascination in—and cleared her plate of food in fifteen minutes before managing to thieve a double helping from my own, her boyish, playful irreverence overshadowing the very light in the room.

Remembering her hammered home ever plainly that the creature I'd brought back from the park was not Laney, and as I stood up to look at the girl from the kitchen window I wondered, with a twisting repulsion, what sort of parents had managed to raise such offspring.

A light rain had fallen; unperturbed, the child knelt at the edge of a flower bed, digging with both hands in the wet soil.

"Hey," I said, sharply. "What are you doing?"

As I stepped outside, one arm raised to shield my hair from the rain, I saw that a number of worms and other insects were churning about in the dirt, as though the child's very digging had drawn them up, like a sea gull's dance. Disconcerted, I leant down to pull the girl away, then stopped, a guttural cry jarring my chest.

The child was shovelling handfuls of the infested soil into its mouth, stones, weeds, and clods of earth alike vanishing into the greedy pit of its throat. Brown and bloody spittle hung from the thin lips in swinging strands, and I was horribly amazed that the little white teeth did not break as they ground down on grit and decorative pebbles.

"No!" I snarled, and with a feat of strength I didn't know I possessed I hoisted the squirming beast under one armpit and carried it back into the house, up to the bathroom.

The chaos of undressing the stranger and thrusting its pale body under the shower head was like a scene from some Victorian asylum, although conducted in an uncanny, scuffling silence that perturbed me more than if the child had screamed. I let go of it and leant, panting with exertion, against the bathroom wall, wondering grimly why I had bothered, why I was still engaging with any of this.

The child looked balefully at me from under a sodden cap of yellow hair, its cut mouth still. My eyes rooted to its pale ears, nudging from behind dripping fronds; their tips were sharp, like white flint, unfamiliar. Another wrongness, another indicator that the girl wasn't mine.

Still, I deposited it in Laney's bedroom for the night, there being no other space in the small house in which to have it sleep. It turned my stomach to think of the feral, silent child touching my daughter's things, leaving its damp scent on her stuffed animals, her pillows, the sheets.

Twitching and unsettled by every perceived sound from Laney's room, I imagined the child gnawing at the walls and crawling through them like a rat, or sickness in a dying tree. I tossed and turned until my pillow was flat and my hair tousled upright. In the end I withdrew the cigarette carton I kept hidden at the back of my sock drawer and smoked to the end of the pack.

When morning came, white and sore as a scar, I went to Laney's room and opened the door slowly, poised to dart back should the child leap at me. Although it hadn't yet expressed any particular violence, outside its outbursts on contact, I well suspected an unprovoked attack would soon come.

As daylight scythed through the doorway I saw that, while the bed was empty, Laney’s quilts had been pulled down between the headboard and the wall into a sort of nest.

The blankets stirred, and a tiny spindle-fingered hand emerged, parting the blankets to reveal a pale eye, squinting at the light. There was only the barest recognition there, as of the pet of an acquaintance that has encountered you once or twice, and briefly at that.

I felt suddenly a foreigner in my own home, alienated by the invader.

I got the child dressed in Laney's clothes as quickly as I was able and dropped it at the school gates, half-hoping that it would take off into the street and become lost indefinitely, unshackling me from its burden. Clinging to that dream, I drove off, glancing back over my shoulder to see the ugly little stick figure with its naked eyes, standing apart from the other students, insidious and strange.

For the first time I was glad of my doldrums office job, numbing my sadness and the lingering dread of the cuckoo child I'd been saddled with through work. I would gladly have chained myself to my laptop for reprieve, so rapidly had all sense and perspective left me in my turmoil. How comforting the beetle drone of the machine was to me, then, the aseptic screen, and its endless figures, and their utter absence of meaning.

A telephone call came, striking me from this drab comfort like a sudden fall in a dream.

Who was it to be? Miss Paxton? My ex husband, poised to gloat?

"Mrs Cameron?" a voice asked—youthful, wavering—as I hesitantly picked up the receiver.

"It's Ms," I said, blandly. "Who is this?"

"Excuse me; my name is Melanie Hale. I'm a volunteer at the National Park— Dianne passed on your contact details. I was the one that brought your daughter in yesterday. Are you free to talk? Dianne thought you might want to clear up some details with me."

"Dianne," I repeated, suddenly alert. "Becker. Yes, I remember her. She was pretty dismissive of my concerns, to be honest."

I heard the younger woman swallow uncomfortably.

"I'm sorry about that. She just has a different way of dealing with the public. I think she appreciated your situation, but— well. It's tricky."

Unimpressed by her rambling, I said, "In what way? Miss Hale— Melanie? I'm certain you've given me the wrong child, and I don't have a scrap of proof. If there's anything you can tell me that would help me, I'd be grateful."

There was another awkward pause before the volunteer answered.

"It's difficult to explain without an intimate knowledge of the park. I've been here three years and still it— surprises me. I found your daughter in a meadow by our biggest lake. You probably heard she'd fallen down an animal burrow of some kind."

How tired I was of the same story, which I little believed.

"Well,” said Melanie. “The thing is, we don't have any animals in the park capable of digging a burrow that large, and it certainly wasn't man made. That rang some alarm bells with me, and probably with Dianne, too, but she would never bring this up with an outsider, unfortunately."

A coldness ran across my shoulder blades like a shadow. I didn't like the halting nervousness in Melanie's voice, the sense that what I'd so long feared, without words, was forming before me.

"Is this about the disappearances in the park?" I asked. "I heard it was drugs, or trafficking—"

"That's the theory the police have been coming to us with," said Melanie, frankly. "And trust me, there's zero evidence of that. But I and plenty of other people have seen things here that might be explained in, uh, less straightforward ways."

I glanced around the office, relieved that none of the other workers were paying attention.

"Such as?" I prompted.

Melanie cleared her throat; a smoker’s cough.

"This is going to sound really strange, but here it is. There are... supernatural happenings here, is the only way I can put it. Everyone has their own idea of what's going on; out in Walpurgis Town the residents are mostly old European settler families, and they brought a lot of their old myths over with them. Or contextualised what they saw with those stories, I guess.

"My Nanna used to tell me about Fae folk that lived in caves and burrows, how they were just straight up mean and hateful to people that came across them. Sometimes they'd steal their possessions, other times the people themselves. And they'd leave their own behind in their places— changelings, I think they're called. They're usually sick, in all the stories.

"Obviously I used to think it was all horse shit, but working here? Seeing the missing folk that turn up... strange? I don't know. There's something here, but I wouldn't call them fairies. Whatever it is feels older than that."

The phone felt slippery in my hand, as though it were a bloodied bone I held in place of metal and plastic.

"Like I said," Melanie stated, "I'm really not supposed to talk about this. There's really no proof at all, so I could get in a lot of trouble for bringing it up with you. Anyway, you probably think I'm nuts."

"No," I whispered, so quietly I doubt she heard my voice. "I don't. Go on."

Clearly relieved, the young ranger continued with a renewed confidence.

"I had such a bad feeling when that teacher called the ranger's station yesterday. I always do when we have one of our weird cases come up. I was told your little girl had gone wandering by the lakeside, so I checked there first, then headed out across a nearby grassland area, which is also pretty well known for reports. When I saw that burrow— to be honest, I wanted to turn back. We all avoid them, usually. Leave them well alone.

"But on the off-chance a kid really had fallen down there I shone my flashlight down the hole, feeling sure as hell something bad was going to happen to me for poking around. Right away I saw a little girl looking right up at me, not saying a word, just... staring. Her eyes didn't look right to me, and she didn't talk, or yell, or anything. Just stood there like a rat when you turn the light on in the kitchen. Not used to people at all.

"I would have backed off and gotten out of there, but that teacher came running up behind me. Clearly figured from the way I was bent over I'd found something. I couldn't walk away then, obviously; nothing I could do but pull the kid out of the burrow and take her over to the ranger's station. She was acting wild, didn't know anybody she saw. I pulled Dianne to one side with my concerns, but she didn't want to know.

"'We've gotta hand her over,' she said to me. 'What do you want me to do? Throw her back? Come on.' Then my shift was over, and there was nothing I could do. I was up all night thinking about it. I don't know if I'm even doing the right thing calling you to tell you all this."

"You are," I said. "You did."

I hung up, and sat with my face in my hands, like a scene from a melodrama, yet feeling nothing of that passion, nothing but the sureness of what I must do.

At the end of the school day I went to pick up the child. As I'd anticipated Miss Paxton was standing with it at the gates, her mouth pressed into a line as thin and white as a chalk drawing.

"Hi," she said, faintly. "Can we talk? Laney's been having some... difficulties at school today."

"Of course she has," I cut in, sharply. "And we both know why that is, don't we?"

The teacher looked taken aback, a guilty avoidance in her eyes.

I looked at the child, which seemed even less a fit in its own skin than ever, flinching and glaring at every passer-by. I gazed hard at the odd little face, the clawing hands with dirt under the nails.

"Let's go," I said, and the child followed, if only in that it knew, in some base manner, that I was its caretaker here, above earth.

I drove out to the National Park without even stopping at home first, having already been by to pick up a change of clothes and a spade, which I had packed in a canvas bag in order to be less conspicuous.

The sun was a low, yellow-red stain against the sky, looking like blood in egg yolk as I tumbled the child out of the car and ushered it out onto the trail. The light imprinted itself on the edges of my vision as we walked, turning all I saw that same shade.

I had a map of the park with me, which was easy enough to follow. Laney's class hadn’t ventured particularly far out, only a couple of hours along one well-used path. Whether or not the child knew then where I was taking it I don't know; it stumbled at the end of my arm with the same fussing displeasure with which it seemed to regard all things.

The lake came into view, and the mountain range beyond it. To the right lay a stretch of grass so flat it was like absinthe spilled across a desktop, intimidating in the vastness of its planes. This was where the ranger, Melanie, had found the child dressed in my daughter's clothes; this was where the burrow dwellers lived, the old mischiefs of Walpurgis legend.

I should have laughed to find myself believing in such myths without question, but I had seen this creature devour dirt and stones, could feel, now, with a firm conviction, the watchful, humming presence of something underfoot, far, far down.

Heading out there I hadn't expected to come across a burrow; the chance of doing so in such grand terrain was inconceivable. Yet the park seemed full of such unlikely details, for after a further twenty minute excursion I nearly found myself tumbling down into a pit much like that which Melanie had described.

I stood at the mouth of it, feeling, as I peered down, the same crushing numbness that had gripped me since the telephone call in the office. Grief, grief without hope of an end was that draining absence, and yet it was through that very hope that I was there.

"Look," I said, to the child. "That's where you came from. I want you to go back down there and give me my daughter."

I don't know why I thought it would understand me. Its white-blue eyes were lifeless but for the captured flare of the sun, its mouth slack, speechless. The young ranger had said the burrower dwellers left their sick in place of the people they took; this creature was surely one of them, insensible to anything that was said to it.

That, or like any animal it only heard my voice as a series of meaningless sounds.

Either way, it could not respond to me, could not give me what I asked for.

I looked at the stranger for a long moment, glancing over my shoulder and all about us, seeing no one else in view at this odd hour. Then, with a quick motion I couldn't take back, I stepped up behind the child and shoved it down into the burrow with both hands, glad that its scrabbling attempts to clamber back up the crumbling sides only pulled grass and dirt down on top of it.

I heard it moving at the bottom of the pit, scratching with its fingernails, and took the spade out of my bag. If the child made any headway up the sloping side of the burrow I would push it back down, I decided, repeating the act as often as I had to until the ones that had sent it above-ground returned my Laney to me. Surely they had her, still, I told myself, had kept her like a pet in their warrens, a thievery that might be reversed.

Yet as I sat on the grass by the burrow, waiting, waiting, I began to consider, with all the imaginative plenty of dread, the possibility that something more terrible than merely being taken might have befallen my daughter.

As night fell, and the cold, and the dark, and the silence provoked me, I at last began to wonder if the young ranger and I had been mistaken.

Perhaps the little girl I had thrown down into the hole in the earth had been my daughter, after all.