by Matthew Cody
“Ah, meine liebe, could you bring me a nice sharp knife?”
Max went through the various drawers until she found a long knife with a serrated edge sharp enough for sawing through the thick bread crust. She still didn’t know her way around this new kitchen.
“Danke,” said Mrs. Amsel, and she began to saw off generous slices of bread. Max had never been able to guess Mrs. Amsel’s age. She bustled around with the energy of a young woman, but her hair showed white beneath the scarf, and the loose skin at her elbows wiggled as she sawed the baguette.
“I brought you and your brother a traditional German breakfast. Mr. Weber’s children won’t starve under my care. And that nice man at the corner grocer gives me a good price on bratwurst.”
Everyone Mrs. Amsel talked about was a nice person. The nice man who delivered the mail, the nice woman who made change at the bank. This nice person and that nice person. If Mrs. Amsel was to be believed, then this was the nicest town in all of Europe. But then Max remembered the nice lady at the pharmacy who’d sold her the hair dye….Great, now Max was doing it, too.
When Mrs. Amsel was done setting out the spread, it looked more like a lunch buffet than a breakfast. Cold cuts, sausages, bread and cheese. Max had explained to her several times that she was a vegetarian, but the housekeeper either hadn’t understood or was choosing to ignore her. “I’ll just have coffee to start, thanks,” said Max.
But Mrs. Amsel snatched the coffee mug from Max’s hands and slid it to the opposite side of the table, far out of Max’s reach. “Coffee stunts your growth,” said Mrs. Amsel. “You want to end up small like me? There’s juice in the icebox.”
As Max dragged herself over to the refrigerator, she wondered how much coffee the diminutive woman had to have drunk to stay that size. She didn’t feel like searching the kitchen for a glass, so Max took a long drink of chilled orange juice straight from the bottle. Mrs. Amsel arched her eyebrow at this lack of manners, but she didn’t comment on it.
“Did you call your mother last night?”
“We talked online.”
“You should call your mother.”
Max wanted to tell Mrs. Amsel, for the sixteenth time, that talking to her mother online was better than calling because they could actually see each other, but Mrs. Amsel was willfully ignorant about computers and, it seemed, the twenty-first century in general. No matter what Max said, in Mrs. Amsel’s mind, a phone call would always be more personal. Calling your parents when you were away was just the right thing to do.
“Did you tell her about your hair?” asked Mrs. Amsel.
“No,” said Max. “I only did it this morning. It was an impulse.”
“Mm-hmm,” said Mrs. Amsel as she slid a plate piled high with sausages and lunch meat in front of Max’s nose.
“And your father?” asked Mrs. Amsel. “What did he say?”
Max tried not to stare at the meat mountain in front of her as she nibbled on a piece of plain bread. She had yet to find a toaster in this house. “Dad came home late and left early. We didn’t talk.”
Mrs. Amsel didn’t answer at first, but poured herself a cup of coffee instead. “Well,” she said after she’d spooned enough sugar into her coffee to turn it into syrup. “Mr. Weber is an important man. And very busy. That’s why I’m here, meine liebe.”
“If he’s so busy, why’d he drag us halfway across the world with him?” said Max. “I would’ve been happier with my mom back in New York, not stuck in this stupid place.”
Max immediately regretted not that she’d said it, but how she’d said it. This stupid place was Mrs. Amsel’s home, after all. Max took another bite of bread, not wanting to look the housekeeper in the eye. Max’s father was ruining her life with this stupid trip of his, but that wasn’t Mrs. Amsel’s fault.
But if the little woman had taken offense, she didn’t show it. “Where is your brother?” she asked as she pushed herself up from the table. “I promised your father I would show you Old Town today, if the walking is not too much for Carter. The boy’s breakfast is getting cold.”
Max didn’t bother pointing out that the traditional German breakfast was mostly cold to begin with.
Mrs. Amsel set off in search of Carter, and the floorboards complained as the little housekeeper hauled herself up the rickety steps. Then Max heard her knock on the bathroom door and her brother’s voice loudly respond, “But I just got in here!”
With a quick glance toward the stairs, Max reached for her coffee and stole a sip. It was room temperature, and Max didn’t normally take it black, but she didn’t feel like searching for the milk, and she was pretty sure Mrs. Amsel had used up all the sugar.
Outside the kitchen window, people were walking briskly along the street, laden with their briefcases and bags as they headed to work, just like back in New York. Cars sped by, and life went on as normally. As Mrs. Amsel had warned, it was turning out to be a hot day already, and Max was wondering if she could figure out how to work the old house’s air conditioner when she spotted something across the street. There was movement in the shade of the grocer’s awning, and at first she thought it must be a cat, but when it moved out into the sunlight, she recognized it for what it really was—a rat. More than one rat, actually, and they were scurrying about the grocer’s fruit stands. What’s more, there was a man standing there as well, and though his torso and head were hidden in the shade, Max could tell that he was very tall, and she could clearly see his muddy shoes and the bottom of his long, threadbare coat. Perhaps he was a street person. There were plenty of those back in New York City, but Max had yet to see one here in this tidy little town. Maybe he was the grocer, and he was content to just let rats play in his food. Max made a mental note to tell Mrs. Amsel not to shop there anymore.
Max was leaning out of the open window to get a better look at the man when her view was suddenly obscured by a group of teenage boys strolling past—laughing and shoving each other as they shared some joke. One of them glanced up at Max, but before they could make eye contact, Max quickly retreated from the window. By the time she looked again, the boys had moved on, and the odd man in the black coat, and the rats, were gone as well.
Max tugged at a pink lock of hair that had fallen in front of her face and examined it between her fingers. It was a soft pink, like baby pajamas. Nothing wild about it at all, really. Just baby-pajamas hair.
“Hamelin stinks,” she muttered.
The worst thing about Carter’s sister was that she hadn’t always been such a giant pain in the rear end. There was a time, not so long ago, when they’d been friends, not just brother and sister. Back then, coming to this new house their father had rented would have been an adventure. The two of them would have played explorers, searching for hidden rooms and passages. A house this old just had to have secrets.
Now, however, Max spent most of her time alone, and when she was with the family, she was constantly staring at her phone or glaring at nothing at all. Carter had been left to explore on his own, and the house had thus far proved to be depressingly ordinary, though Carter held out hope for the cellar. Still, he would have had a better chance at finding something really interesting if Max had helped. They should have been playing detective and staying up well past his bedtime to tell ghost stories by flashlight. But Carter feared it was too late now for his sister, because the Crouch had gotten hold of her.
Their father taught folklore back in New York City, and what’s more, he’d even written books on the subject. That meant Carter and his sister had grown up in a family full of stories. The stories weren’t theirs exactly, because their father had collected them from all over the world, but they felt like they belonged to Carter. He had nearly memorized the Grimm brothers’ tales by the time he was seven. He’d moved on to the folk stories of Anansi the spider after that, and to Coyote of the Native Americans after that. When Carter finally had exhausted other people’s stories, he’d begun making up his own.
Thus was born Carter’s l
egend of the Crouch. An invisible creature, the Crouch preyed upon boys and girls of a certain age—Carter decided seventh graders were a good fit—and would clamber up on top of its victim’s shoulders and perch there unseen. It was undetectable to the rest of the world, but the poor adolescent could feel its weight pressing down on her shoulders, forcing her to walk around in a constant slump. The taller the victim grew, the heavier the Crouch became, until it was too much effort to even stand up straight. The Crouch made it so hard to look at the world around you that it was easier to stay slumped over all the time and stare at the floor, or your phone.
But the very worst thing about the Crouch was that it loved to pour malicious lies into its victim’s ears. Life was too embarrassing to have any fun, the Crouch whispered. Mothers were embarrassing. Fathers were embarrassing. Little brothers were really embarrassing.
This whole trip to Germany had revealed that Carter’s sister was deep in the clutches of a particularly nasty Crouch. This morning’s pink hair had probably been the Crouch’s idea, too.
Today, led by Mrs. Amsel, Carter and Max were on a tour of Old Town, a walled-off section of Hamelin that had been mostly preserved since medieval times. Here the streets were lined with cobblestones, and the shops looked like ones from a storybook village. Mrs. Amsel told them that some of the sandstone houses dated back four hundred years or more. It was amazing to think that those delicate-looking cottages were older than the United States itself. The town as a whole had been around much longer than that, but most of the buildings had been rebuilt at one time or another over the years. Carter found it impossible to walk down those streets and not feel like he was walking back through time. He liked to pretend he’d been transported to the past, where he was the captain of the town guard, patrolling the streets for brigands and spies.
He’d tried to get Max to play along, but she just rolled her eyes at him and said she didn’t even know what a brigand was. He would have been happy to tell her that a brigand was just another word for a bandit, but she was too busy listening to the Crouch to listen to Carter.
It was also hard to be the captain of the guard when Mrs. Amsel wouldn’t stop fussing over him. Carter couldn’t walk twenty feet without the little woman stopping to ask if he needed a rest. It got to be so irritating that when Carter had felt like pausing, when the plastic and metal brace that extended from his left foot to just below his knee had started to rub painfully against his shin, he said nothing. It would have been a simple thing to fix, just tighten the straps, but by the time it’d started to become a real problem, he’d told Mrs. Amsel that he was fine so many times that he didn’t want to give her the satisfaction of his admitting he needed to stop.
He knew it was silly, but Carter would happily endure a rub burn rather than prove the woman right.
It wasn’t her fault, really, and Mrs. Amsel was kind in her own way. She certainly stuffed the two of them with enough homemade cakes and local sweets to last them for months. But after nine years of walking with a brace, plus one failed surgery, Carter knew best when he needed extra help and when he did not. It was too bad that Mrs. Amsel, like most of the world, didn’t always believe him.
Whenever Mrs. Amsel asked Carter if he wanted to rest, Max rolled her eyes at the little housekeeper behind the woman’s back, but pointedly enough so that Carter could see. It was a small thing, but it meant a lot to him. It meant that the Crouch hadn’t won yet.
The Old Town square turned out to be an open-air plaza filled with café tables and fountains topped with statues. Mrs. Amsel was leading them along a special path of bricks among the cobblestones, each one inlaid with the image of a rat. They served as markers for tourists looking for Hamelin’s main attraction—the Pied Piper. Several of the fountains were carved in his likeness, and at least one shop had Pied Piper Monopoly sets for sale in the window. Carter would have to convince his father to buy him one of those before they went home to New York.
The stone rats led them to an ancient house on a corner, with an arched wooden doorway framed by two gaslight lanterns. The building was topped with a pointed slate roof, but something in the angles of it looked all wrong to Carter, as if the lines zigzagged unnecessarily. It wasn’t the kind of thing he liked staring at, and from the various nooks and crannies, puckered stone faces leered at passersby. But there was a welcome bench outside the house, and Carter finally took the opportunity to rest his leg and adjust the straps on his brace.
“This is the Rattenfängerhaus,” said Mrs. Amsel.
“What’s a Ratten-whatever?” Max asked.
“The ratcatcher’s house,” said Mrs. Amsel. “The house named for the Pied Piper. This one is very interesting for your father, I think.”
“Then I don’t really care,” said Max.
Carter wished his sister wouldn’t talk like that. Their father was working on an important book about the town legend, and while it was true that this was the first research trip their mother hadn’t accompanied them on, Max was taking their mother’s absence personally, as if their father had done something wrong. Carter wasn’t happy that their father was too busy to spend time with them, but he wasn’t punishing other people for it. Max had gotten it into her stubborn head that she needed to be uninterested in everything her father might be interested in, including the Pied Piper. Which was going to be hard because, as far as Carter could tell, Hamelin was one big Pied Piper tourist trap.
“There are a lot of gargoyles on that house,” said Carter, craning his neck to get a good look at the grimacing statues.
“To scare away the spirits of the dark forest,” said Mrs. Amsel. “The forest held many dangers. From mischievous kobolds that would butter your shoes when you were sleeping to wood witches who liked nothing better than to bake children into pies! People back then were afraid of the dark magic of the world, not just wolves and brigands.”
At the mention of the word brigands, Carter gave his sister a smug nod. “That means bandits,” he whispered. Max ignored him.
“Back home there are faces in the architecture everywhere, all over New York City,” Carter told Mrs. Amsel. “Faces covered in leaves, called green men. Dad points them out to us all the time.”
“And do people believe in these green men still?” asked Mrs. Amsel.
“No,” said Carter. “Most people don’t even realize they’re there.”
“People can look at so much and yet they see nothing,” laughed Mrs. Amsel. “It is the same with us. Too few remember the past. Especially the young.”
“Oh, come on,” said Max. “And what—this is supposed to be the Pied Piper’s real house?”
“Oh, no,” said Mrs. Amsel. “This house was built in the sixteen hundreds, long after the piper’s time.”
“Yeah, and the Pied Piper is just a fairy tale!” said Max. “Where’s Little Red Riding Hood’s penthouse? Around here somewhere?”
Mrs. Amsel placed her hands on her hips. “Am vielen Lachen erkennt man den Narren,” she said, shaking her head. “You want to know why we call it the Piper’s House, mein lieber? Come, I will show you.”
Carter hauled himself back to his feet before Mrs. Amsel could ask if he was ready to walk, but his leg was much better now that he’d fitted the strap correctly. The housekeeper led the two of them away from the front of the house to a narrow side street. Unlike the rest of the town square, where there were raucous crowds and street performers everywhere, this little avenue was quiet and mostly empty except for a few tourists taking pictures. They were gathered around a plaque set into the side of the Piper’s House. One of them, a man with a bulky camera and hip pouch, was trying to be discreet as he stared at Carter’s leg. It was left to Carter to pretend not to notice.
“This street is called Bungelosenstrasse,” said Mrs. Amsel, softly. “No one dances here, or plays music. We keep our voices low, out of respect.”
“Why?” asked Max.
“Because this street is where he took them,” said Mrs. Amsel. “Look there.
”
Mrs. Amsel pointed to the plaque, which was written in German. “In English, roughly, it says:
In the year 1284 after the birth of Christ
From Hamelin were led away
One hundred thirty children, born at this place
Led away by a piper into a mountain.”
Carter was glad when she reached the end. Of course, he loved stories, but something about hearing those words spoken aloud, especially on this strangely quiet street, gave him goose bumps.
It had less of an effect on his sister. “Why’s this town so crazy about one fairy tale?” Max asked. “This is just for the tourists, right?”
“Ah,” said Mrs. Amsel. “But this is not a fairy tale.”
“You’re not telling me you believe it?” asked Max. “That a magic piper stole all Hamelin’s children away?”
Mrs. Amsel squinted at her. “That doesn’t make it a fairy tale,” she said. “Fairy tales have happy endings.”
“Mrs. Amsel,” said Carter. “You know a lot about this stuff.”
“All Hameliners know the story of the Pied Piper,” she said.
“Yeah, but you know a lot. Are you a folklorist like our dad?”
“Hmph,” said Mrs. Amsel. “Your father is an important man. I am just a housekeeper. Now come, we don’t want to be late.”
Mrs. Amsel turned and led them away from Bungelosenstrasse, and as they walked, Carter caught his sister’s eye and mouthed, What’s the matter with you?
Max mouthed back, She’s senile, and made a crazy gesture with her finger.
Hopeless.
They followed their housekeeper until they reached a small stage that had been erected in the center of the plaza. Paper lanterns were strung from the trees, and behind the stage, a giant curtain painted to look like a mountain range hung as a backdrop. Crowds of tourists, and even a few locals, were gathered in front of it, waiting patiently. Street vendors passed in and out of the crowd, selling sweets and souvenirs.