1. The Changeling Baby


    Date: 1/1/2016, Categories: Supernatural, Author: TamLin, Rating: 3, Source: LushStories

    much as a child, and he sat down with it in a quiet corner with it. Inside were vivid illustrations of fairy tale creatures: wizened gnomes, shy, knowing fairies, shadowy dwarfs, and one image that had particularly frightened his as a child of a huge, lantern-jawed ogre, roasting meat over a fire. He paused at the ogre illustration. It was similar, but not quite what he was looking for. On the next page, he found it: a painting of a beautiful woman sitting on a tree stump, surrounded by huge, shaggy creatures with long faces and enormous noses. Three of them seemed to be men and the fourth was a stooped, old-woman monster. It was called, "The Princess and the Trolls", and the caption read: "Look at them, Troll Mother said, look at my sons! You won't find more beautiful trolls on this side of the moon." Troll. He turned the word over and over in his mind. It seemed right, somehow. The illustration certainly looked like the monsters from the previous day. They were almost identical, in fact. But were there really such things as trolls in this day and age? He turned the page and there was another troll illustration, this one of a woodcutter who seemed to have just freed a troll from under a fallen tree. The caption said: "And in return the trolls promised not to trouble his family evermore, and to take no changeling from his descendants." The word "changeling" rang a faint remembrance in William's mind. He put the picture book back in the kids’ section, then browsed the other ...
    shelves until he found a book on Celtic folk stories. Looking up "changeling" in the index, he found the relevant page: "There is particularly pronounced belief among the laboring classes that children are vulnerable to abduction by fairies. Supposedly the sidhe creatures will steal a child out of its crib and replace it with one of their own, and this substitute is what they know as a 'changeling.’ The fairy will pose as the stolen child for some time before seeming to die (but in fact simply returning back to its own fairy family), sometimes causing mischief before it departs.” William pondered what he'd read. The trolls had said they wanted his help getting their son back. Were they talking about the Menskr baby? The changeling book was about fairies, but maybe trolls and fairies were the same thing. Had the trolls stolen the real Menskr baby and left a changeling in its place? Why would they come to William for help getting it back? Because the baby spoke to him, of course. But why him in the first place? William returned the books and took the bus home. His reading made him feel better, somehow. At least now he had a name for what was happening, and some information that almost made sense. He was now more confident that the creatures (trolls?) were real, though what they wanted was still a mystery. He considered going for a walk in the park and seeing if he encountered them again, but decided there was no need. They knew where to find him, after all. All he had to do was ...
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