Pay the Piper Read online

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  For big David, forever

  —J. Y.

  For Alison and wee David, fey children I am proud to call my own

  —A. S.

  With special thanks to Greg Feeley.

  And apologies to Northampton and Hadley, Massachusetts, for any liberties we have taken with their geographies, as well as apologies to Smith College, whose John M. Greene Hall was pressed into service for the Brass Rat concert, though it really only holds about half of the audience we proposed for it.

  From the Authors

  Based on a true event, the tale of the Pied Piper of Hamelin (or as they spelled it in German, Hameln) has always fascinated us. We are both musicians and storytellers and the piper was a performer so talented he didn’t just entertain his audience—he enchanted them!

  This is what is known about the reputed piper: On the 26th of June, 1284, “came a colorful piper to Hamelin and led 130 children away…” At least this is what the earliest account—a piece of Latin prose—says some 150 years after the event.

  More interesting than the bare fact is the why of it.

  Why did the piper come and why did the children leave with him? Some scholars say that they went off on a crusade, or that they were recruited as settlers for Northern Germany or Transylvania. Some say the town had the Black Plague and the children had to be led out of town to save them. Some guess that the children had eaten bread infected with ergot, a disease of rye grain that leads to bizarre dancing and shaking. Some people have even theorized that the Pied Piper was an alien and that the children were swept off of earth in a UFO.

  The legend of the Pied Piper is now a tourist gimmick in the (very real) town of Hameln. Poets like Robert Browning and Goethe have written about the piper. Operas, musicals, pantomimes, and ballets based on the story have been produced. Children’s books telling the story in dozens of languages have been published. Pop groups like Jethro Tull and Abba have written songs based on it. And scholarly papers by the dozens have been penned trying to explain just what really happened so long ago in that small town.

  Being novelists, we have come up with a different idea altogether, one that has little to do with Hamelin and a lot to do with Faerie. If it is an unlikely explanation, at least it fits all the known facts. And clears up a few other mysterious disappearances that history has left unexplained.

  Because what if the events in Hamelin had been just a small piece of a very big pie? That was our starting point. The answer becomes then: Could we in our very modern clothes actually—someday—be forced to Pay the Piper?

  —Jane Yolen and Adam Stemple

  Come away, O human child!

  To the waters and the wild

  With a faery, hand in hand,

  For the world’s more full of weeping

  Than you can understand.

  —William Butler Yeats

  1 · River of Blood

  The piper caught sight of the river long before the sound of rushing water reached his ears or the salt smell of blood struck his nose. The river coiled around the landscape like a red serpent below him.

  “All the blude that’s shed on earth runs thro the springs o’ that countrie,” his traveling companion intoned, his long face without guile.

  The piper grunted but made no other reply. He knew the old song as well as his friend did. Perhaps better.

  “One last border to cross,” he said. One last border, he meant, and his exile would begin in earnest.

  What a strange word exile is, he thought. To be x-ed out, sent away from one’s home, that place of serenity and peace. Never to live again at home, the country of the Ever Fair, where death has such small dominion.

  Picking his way along the bonny road toward the final border, he realized that his father was not going to forgive him. Somewhere, deep down, he had always believed his punishment a sham, had always believed that his father would be following them at a distance, waiting for the right moment to call them back and say that all was forgiven.

  Forgiven or forgotten. That it was all a misunderstanding. That his brother, the heir, had recovered from what had seemed a fatal blow.

  But his father’s curse, once spoken, had been binding. No one followed behind. And the blow his brother had suffered had certainly been fatal, as the piper well knew.

  After all, he was the one who had dealt it.

  2 · Family Jokes

  Getting ready for school, Callie looked into the mirror, tugging at her pumpkin-colored hair with an old brush. She wished she could blame either her mother or father for the color, but they were both dishwater blondes. No one in the family on either side—so her mother had assured her—had ever had hair that color before.

  “The milkman,” Dad often quipped, winking and then laughing uproariously. Callie had been ten before she got it, the year they taught biology in her elementary school. She’d come home, slammed her books onto the kitchen table, and shouted, “No more heredity jokes.” Only she’d said “hera-dairy” instead, which had become a family joke in itself.

  Family jokes.

  “This whole family is a joke,” Callie said. She exaggerated her voice so that she sounded like Morticia on the Addams Family, but deep inside she knew that she meant it.

  First, there was the question of her name. Calcephony. It was a leftover from her parents’ romance with the 60s, though they’d hardly been alive then. She knew it could have been worse. They’d talked about Evenstar and Dawn Rider and even Turalura before settling on Calcephony.

  Of course, when she’d first taken violin lessons, they’d laughed and said they should have named her Cacophony because that’s what the violin sounded like. Cacophony—which meant an awful noise, as any competent dictionary would say.

  Her friends just called her Callie, and that suited her much better.

  Callie stuck her tongue out at the mirror. The tongue was white-coated, as if she’d some wasting disease. Not that she’d tell her parents. They’d make her stay home and dose her with herbal medications that tasted as if they still had dirt on the roots. She didn’t mind skipping school when she was sick. She wasn’t some grade wonk after all. But it would mean staying home from the evening concert, too. And after all she’d done to convince her parents to let her go.

  Well, at least to let the family go. Her mom and her dad and her tagalong brother Nick. For Nickelodeon. Much worse than Calcephony, even she had to admit.

  And even harder to take was her older brother’s name—Marsepolus. He was in his last year in college, and probably delighted to be far away. Now he was known as Mars. But what he’d had to go through—Mars Bars, Martian, Marsupial,
Marzipan. It was astonishing he was so even-tempered.

  Honestly, Callie thought, parents should be trained before they are allowed to name their children. Trained with a whip, like any wild animals.

  * * *

  THE WHOLE CONCERT THING HAD started on a Monday two weeks earlier. Callie had heard through the school grapevine that a really hot band was coming to the Valley.

  “Faster than a speeding ticket,” was how her best friend Josee always described the school rumor-mill. Josee had a way with words. Lots of words.

  “Which band?” Callie asked.

  “Brass Rat!” Josee actually squealed the name, then twisted a piece of her black hair. Josee had hair like mattress springs, dark, oiled, coiled. She was long-legged, like a colt. “Brass Rat is the single most, industrial-strength, ever-bopping, high-flying, celestial…” That was Josee. Never one word where a dozen could do.

  Now even Callie had heard of Brass Rat—who hadn’t? But they weren’t on her Top Ten, or even her Top Twenty, though maybe the next five after that. A folk rock band—“rock and reel” Josee called them—when what Callie really preferred was either straight folk or straight rock.

  “Coming here? To the Valley? You have got to be kidding!” She was really stunned. No bands ever came to the Valley that she’d heard of. Well, almost no one. Certainly no one on her Top Ten—or even Top Twenty.

  Josee had nodded and opened her mouth to speak. But Alison—who always seemed attached to Josee at the hip and was therefore Callie’s second best friend by default—squealed. “Next Friday squared!” If Josee used lots of words, Alison spoke in shorthand. And as tall as Josee was, Alison was short and round, with strange long arms, which made her look like she’d been drawn by a three-year-old. But she made up in heart what she lacked in words or height.

  Callie knew that “Next Friday squared” meant two weeks from that Friday. On the day before Halloween.

  “I’m going to work on my folks, two-prong attack, back and front, a regular army up-and-at-’em, they’ll never know what hit them,” said Josee.

  Callie guessed that getting to the concert was going to be a piece of cake for Josee. Her parents hardly kept an eye on her. Or an ear. She was a latchkey kid supreme.

  “Me two,” squealed Alison.

  “Me three.” Callie had said it without much enthusiasm. She hardly expected her parents to give her permission. For all their joking, and their bad taste in names, her parents were really quite strict. When talking to her friends, Callie called them the Parent Trap, meaning they kept her entrapped, tailed, jailed, and nailed. She had to sign in and sign out whenever she went anywhere. She’d even been fingerprinted and registered with the local police from the time she was one. Maybe that was understandable. Mars had gone missing one evening when he was seven, doing a walkabout. Gone up into a neighbor’s tree house to spend the night on his own. It had scared them all silly. Especially Mars, because an owl roosting in the next tree had cried out like a baby half the night. Mars had been too scared to scream for help, or to come down on his own. The police had found him in the morning. After that, they were all fingerprinted and the doors had been triple locked from the inside and there was an alarm system that Callie was sure rivaled the National Mint’s.

  No, Callie hardly expected permission from her parents to go to a concert on her own, but a plan had begun to form that very moment. Callie was good with plans. With her parents, she had to be.

  “I’ll tell them I’m writing a story about the band for the school paper,” she told her friends. “Schoolwork trumps everything in their universe.”

  “Phantasmagoric!” said Josee. “Supercal and all that.”

  “Double,” Alison added.

  A moment’s worry hit Callie. “Do you think they’ll go for it?”

  “It’ll work like a charm, like a magic spell, like…” Josee began.

  “Clockwork,” Alison finished for her.

  Callie smiled at them. They were not only her best friends, they were her cheering section. “Thanks.”

  * * *

  THAT AFTERNOON, WITH A NOTE from her journalism teacher, and a number to call at the concert venue, Callie went home to put her plan into action.

  Her parents had surprised her. Callie was still amazed at how easily they’d been convinced. It’d been a piece of cake. An enormous slice, actually.

  “Brass Rat?” her dad had said, running fingers through his thinning blonde hair. He’d looked down at the flier Callie thrust at him. Dog-eared and messy with fingerprints, it had been downloaded off the Internet, then passed around at school to those few friends who didn’t have e-mail. “I love them. We saw them back when Mars was an infant and…”

  Yada, yada, yada, Callie had thought, not listening. In the good old rock-and-roll days. In the Cretaceous. Of course she doubted that was possible. The band members were all young and hot. But she was careful not to say this aloud. Instead, fluttering her eyelids, she looked up at her dad with what passed for quiet adoration. “Then…” and let the question hang in the air.

  He took the bait. “Maybe…”

  That’s when she’d set the hook deep. “The family never goes to things together anymore. Not since Mars went off to college.”

  He’d turned. “Myrna,” he called to her mom. “Listen up. I’ve got a great idea.”

  And then, just to totally embarrass Callie, he began to sing one of the early Brass Rat songs.

  “Under the hill, under the stone,

  No one can touch me, for I am alone,

  No one can reach me, no one can dare,

  No one can love me, and I do not care.”

  “Harmony!” her mom shouted as she came into the room, her voice warbling about a half an octave above his.

  Oh God, no! Callie thought, her parents were fans! She was thankful her friends weren’t around to hear them.

  Except for the plan, Callie would have run out of the room, slamming the door behind her. But she stayed. Stayed and said with sweet conviction when they were finished, “Gee—I didn’t know you knew Brass Rat that well.”

  “We know that one song,” Mom said. “It was a number one back when Mars was a toddler. Got to hear them somewhere, I forget where. Didn’t know they were still together. Dan—we have to go to the concert! The whole family.”

  The whole family? Callie’s stomach flopped over. “But Mars is at school.”

  “Well, we’ll see if he wants to come home for the weekend,” her mother amended.

  Her father shook his head. “Halloween’s big at his school. Costume parties and…”

  Breaking into song again, her mother sang the next two lines:

  “I do not care, for I am a stone,

  No one can touch me, for I am alone.”

  Then she laughed. “What a sad-sack song that is. I wonder what his problem was.”

  “No wifey, no kidlets.” Her father reached out a hand.

  In a minute it was going to get seriously icky. Callie decided intervention was her only hope. “So who will come?”

  They were holding hands now, but at least they’d stopped singing and talking baby talk. “Your mom, me, you—and Nick,” her father said.

  In order to throw them off the scent, she said with a deep frown, “Does Nick have to come, too?” Though Nick would keep the two of them busy.

  “If you want to go, Nick goes, too,” her dad said. “And you’ll take him to the interview as well.”

  That was definitely not part of her plan. This time her frown was real.

  “Dad…” she wailed.

  But there was to be no winning this argument. Callie left the room and slammed the door.

  3 · Talent

  A cold thin drizzle wormed its way down the window. The piper sighed. He could smoke his one cigarillo under the canopy, but it wouldn’t be pleasant.

  The trouble with habits, he thought, was not that they could kill you. It was that they could be boring for an eternity. He turned up the collar of
his pea coat and went out into the wet and the cold.

  A family with two kids, a thin girl with orange ragweed hair about fourteen, a boy about seven with wide speedwell eyes, went past him, running into the warmth of the hall. So intent were they to get in out of the rain, they didn’t recognize him.

  Fame is fleeting, his mother had always told him. Family is forever.

  “And alliteration is annoying,” he had replied once, lashing out and trying to hurt her feelings. He was brash and bitter then, as all young men are when they begin yearning to make their own mark on the world. And feel the bonds of their family like chains.

  But his mother had merely patted his head and whispered in his ear, “You are my favorite, you know. So talented…”

  The cigarillo suddenly tasted bitter and he spit three times and muttered a curse in the old tongue.

  Talented, he thought. Not wise like my older brother, nor brave like my younger. But talented.

  He ground the cigarillo out on his boot heel.

  Time to go in and put that talent to work.

  Time to sing for his supper.

  Time to rock and roll.

  4 · At the Concert

  Nick tugged on Callie’s press pass which hung around her neck in a plastic pocket. She’d been given it at the door. It had her name in big block letters and her school paper’s name underneath, The Hamper.

  Staring up at her with his little pointy chin lifted, Nick looked like a mini-clone of their father. “Callie, will they be coming out soon?”

  They. The band.

  Brass Rat.

  She hummed a bit of their signature tune, the words running through her brain.

  “Out of the darkness and into the light,

  We search for a chance to get into the fight.…”

  She’d spent the last week listening to a couple of her parents’ old CDs to soak up what her journalism teacher called ambiance. When she’d checked that word in the dictionary, she saw it meant “surroundings.” So she had surround-sounded herself with Brass Rat ambiance.