by Matthew Cody
“What are we waiting for?” asked Max. “Rats the musical?”
“Today is June twenty-sixth,” said Mrs. Amsel.
“Oh!” said Carter. “That’s the anniversary of the story! Dad told me.”
Mrs. Amsel nodded. “We put on a play every year for the tourists, but the children enjoy it, too.”
While they waited for the show to begin, Mrs. Amsel waved over a vendor and bought each of them a pack of black licorice rats. Max made a face as Carter managed to fit three into his mouth at once. He let the tails dangle over his chin.
“Ugh, disgusting,” she said. “Here, you can have mine.”
“Mission accomplished,” mumbled Carter past a mouthful of gummy rats.
As church bells began to ring, the crowd quieted and the rat vendors ceased their calls. Everyone’s attention turned to the little stage as an elderly couple dressed in colorful frocks and garish stage makeup entered through the curtain. The round little man put his arms around his plump wife.
“He is not the sort of person who should be wearing tights,” whispered Max.
The man was talking to the audience, delivering his lines in German.
“Lean close, children,” Mrs. Amsel said softly. “I will translate the story for you.”
Carter did as he was told, but his sister stayed where she was, arms crossed defiantly across her chest.
“Once upon a time,” said Mrs. Amsel. “The village of Hamelin was overrun with rats.” Right then the curtains parted, and the rats—who were actually just children dressed in felt rat costumes—scurried onstage.
“Oh, would you look at them?” cried Mrs. Amsel. “Such dears!” The children were trying their best to look menacing, but they couldn’t see very well in their floppy rat masks—the snouts dangled in front of their eyes—and they kept bumping into each other. The audience was breaking out in giggles.
“Oh, but here comes the important part,” said Mrs. Amsel, suddenly serious when a man dressed in a clownish red, yellow and green cloak took the stage. “One night,” continued Mrs. Amsel, “it seemed the villagers’ prayers for deliverance were answered, and a piper in a pied coat arrived and offered to rid the village of the rats once and for all. The town elders were desperate, even though the Piper had asked for a fee that not even a king could pay. Nevertheless, they agreed to his terms, and they watched, amazed, as the Piper began to play and the rats answered his call. Throughout the village he danced, and the rats followed. He led them to the river Weser, and there they drowned.”
As Mrs. Amsel narrated, the Piper onstage played and the rats danced around him until one by one they disappeared behind a new backdrop curtain that had been painted to look like a river winding through the countryside.
“The Piper returned to the elders and demanded his payment, but the villagers could not afford such a sum. They offered to pay him what they could spare, but it was only a fraction of what he’d demanded. The Piper swore vengeance.
“Now the village elders, in their pride, were not afraid of the Piper. The rats were dead, drowned in the river, so what could one angry Piper do to them? They laughed at his threats and decided to pay him nothing at all.
“They were fools.” Mrs. Amsel pointed to the Piper onstage and whispered, “Watch.”
The Piper began to play again, only this time the song was slower, more melancholy than before. The curtain rose once more, revealing the children, changed out of their rat costumes and sleeping soundly in their beds. Carter expected the audience to respond, to ooh and aah at the adorable sleeping children, but no one said a word. They were rapt, their attention on the play. Carter’s was on Mrs. Amsel. She was whispering so softly now that he had to lean in very close to hear. He was surprised to find his sister leaning in, too.
“The Piper stole back to Hamelin in the late hours of night,” whispered Mrs. Amsel. “And he played a new song. This time, as he danced throughout the village, it was the children who answered his call. Across the square and along the Bungelosenstrasse, they danced, through the gate and beyond, into the mountains, where they disappeared.”
As Mrs. Amsel narrated, the Piper actor and the children did actually dance off the stage and through the square until they reached the Bungelosenstrasse, the quiet street. Then he stopped playing, and they marched solemnly away.
“All the children who could walk followed him, all but one,” said Mrs. Amsel, and at this Carter noticed that one boy had been left behind—a small boy who walked with crutches. He’d tried to keep up, but the procession was too fast for him and he was left in the square alone.
Carter could feel Mrs. Amsel’s eyes on him as he watched the boy struggle to catch up. She sounded hesitant to continue. “The boy who was left behind…he told the villagers what had occurred, and it is thanks to him that Hamelin knows what became of its children, even if they are lost forever.”
Mrs. Amsel cleared her throat. “Or so the story goes.”
Carter felt his cheeks burning as he shifted uneasily. He winced as his brace banged against a wrought iron streetlamp. At the sound, several heads turned his way.
His sister was next to him. He could feel her watching him. “What?” he said. “I’m fine.”
That was a lie. He knew the story of the Pied Piper well enough to know that there was always a boy who got left behind, someone who could tell the tale. But in the versions he’d read, it had been a blind boy who’d gotten lost trying to follow the others, or a deaf boy who couldn’t hear the music at all. This version was new to him. This boy was new to him. When the boy had first appeared onstage, Carter had thought, or he’d hoped, that the boy might turn out to be a hero and break the Piper’s spell or something like that. But that wasn’t how the story ended. It ended with the boy left behind. Carter felt stupid himself for wishing anything different.
“I’m fine,” he told his sister again.
“Okay,” Max said, sounding uncertain.
“Really, I said I’m fine!”
“And I said okay!”
Then the song was over. The stage curtain drew closed and the audience around them started to applaud. Max was still watching Carter, and it wasn’t until he started clapping that she joined in, too.
Max’s mind had wandered throughout much of the first half of the play as she wondered what her friends were doing back home and whether their mother was lonely in their empty apartment. But the play’s ending had taken a disturbing turn, one that had been hard to ignore. That was the thing she hated about the stories her dad collected—they might seem charming and magical, but there was usually something dark hiding just beneath the surface. Sure Hansel and Gretel defeated the witch in the end, but they’d gotten lost in the forest in the first place because their parents had abandoned them there. Little Red was saved by the huntsman but not until after the wolf had devoured her grandmother. And the townsfolk of Hamelin refused to pay the Piper, so their children had to pay the price.
As the audience dispersed, Max glanced over at the street vendors hawking their wares. It was a horrible thing to be selling souvenirs of such a terrible story. Then there was that part at the end with the boy who was left behind. Max watched Carter closely after that. Her little brother was tough, tougher than most people gave him credit for, but sometimes when you weren’t expecting something was when it hit you the hardest, and neither of them had been expecting that. Max had spent many years sticking up for her younger brother. She’d faced down more than one ignorant jerk who had decided to target Carter because he was different. As he got older, Carter had learned how to stick up for himself. “Words only hurt if you let them,” he’d say. But sometimes things people say are sharp enough to cut no matter how thick you think your skin is.
Her brother was a tough kid, but he was still only a kid.
Carter insisted he was fine, however, so Max decided to let it go. He already had one little old lady hovering over him; he didn’t need another.
The Piper and the children had returned
to the stage to take their bows, and now they were mingling with the crowd. The actor who’d played the Piper played his flute for the tourists’ kids and posed for pictures. Who wouldn’t want a picture of their child with the child catcher?
“Where’s the kid on the crutches?” asked Carter.
“I dunno,” said Max, looking around. “He must be here somewhere.”
“I’m going to look for him,” said Carter.
“Don’t wander off,” said Mrs. Amsel. She was red-faced and sweaty and sat down heavily on a bench. “This heat! I’ll rest a minute, but you children stay together and don’t leave the plaza.”
Max followed her brother as he searched for the boy, but they hadn’t gotten far when they were waylaid by a street performer juggling fire sticks over his head.
“Guten tag, mein liebe,” said the young man as Max walked around him, trying to give him and his fire sticks a wide berth.
“I’m sorry, I don’t speak German,” Max said.
“Ah, American?” said the juggler, smiling. He was dressed in a jester’s motley outfit, the tassels topped with little bells like fairy chimes. “Do you like magic?”
Max thought about the magic in her father’s stories, and in the play they’d just seen. Magic rarely led to good in those tales, but of course that wasn’t the kind of magic this young man was referring to.
“Do you know any card tricks?” Max asked. The juggler laughed, even as he twirled a fire stick over his head and caught it again. Several nearby people clapped for him.
“Magic is magic, if you believe in it,” he said. “Watch!” Then the fire began to change color. As he spun the torches expertly into the air, the flames changed from orange to blue, to green and, lastly, to purple.
There was more excited applause, and Max supposed it was only polite to join in. It was certainly a nice trick. The juggler must’ve treated his fire sticks with some kind of chemical that changed color when it burned, though Max had to admit that she couldn’t remember ever seeing a purple flame before.
She’d just turned around to ask her brother if he had any theories about the color-changing fire (Carter was full of theories about everything) when she realized he was gone. He was so much shorter than the rest of the adults, it was hard to know if he’d wandered just a few feet away or to the other side of the plaza. “Carter?”
“Look! Look!” said the juggler. “I have more magic, my American girl!”
Max ignored the street performer as she pushed through the crowd, searching for her brother. Mrs. Amsel had specifically told them to stay together, and Max didn’t feel like getting a lecture from their housekeeper today. The longer Max went without finding him, the more annoyed she got.
“Carter! Carter!”
Finally she spotted him. He’d wandered over to the Piper’s House. Why had he left in the first place? Was he trying to get her in trouble? Then, as Max started to make her way over to him, she spotted something troubling. Across from the Piper’s House, an alley opened onto the quiet street, and at this time of day, with the sun sinking low, that alley was little more than a pool of shadow. Something in the alley moved. It was just a shuffle of feet stepping into the sunlight and the swaying of a ragged coat in the breeze. A figure in a long black coat was standing there, mostly hidden in the shadows, just feet from her brother.
Max stepped up her pace to a run. Carter was walking toward the Bungelosenstrasse, and toward that alley. He was probably still looking for the boy, and he wasn’t watching where he was going. The man in the alley took a step forward but seemed reluctant to leave the shade.
“Carter!” Max shouted. It was enough that heads turned her way and one of the street musicians stopped strumming his guitar as he looked around to see what the commotion was about.
“What?” said her brother, looking at her.
The man retreated a few steps into the alley. Max caught up to her brother and grabbed him by the wrist, more roughly than she’d meant to.
“Ow!” he cried. “What’s your problem?”
“Why’d you wander off like that?” said Max. Her heart was beating fast in her chest and she felt a little sick. “I couldn’t find you anywhere!”
“Mrs. Amsel said to stay in the plaza,” he protested. “I’m in the plaza.”
Max looked over her brother’s shoulder. The man was still there, only some twenty feet away, but hard to get a good look at because of the way he hugged the shadows. Alhough there were no rats this time, Max was sure it was the same man she’d seen this morning at the fruit stand across from their house. She recognized the black coat and the filthy shoes.
“What are you looking at?” asked Carter, following her gaze.
“I’ve seen that man before,” Max whispered. “He was outside our house this morning.”
“Are you sure?” said Carter. “I can’t get a good look at him.”
“I’m sure. Come on, I want to get out of here.”
Thankfully, Carter didn’t argue with her, and the two of them set off to find Mrs. Amsel. As they walked, Max glanced back over her shoulder several times to see if the man in the black coat had moved from his place in the shadows, to see if he’d dared to come out into the sun. He hadn’t.
“Hamelin is not like New York City,” Mrs. Amsel was saying. “But we sometimes get drifters looking to beg money off the tourists. Vagrants. Most are harmless, poor souls, but you children are right to stay away.”
Carter knew that his sister hadn’t wanted to tell Mrs. Amsel about the man in the alley, but if the man had scared his sister that much, Carter figured Mrs. Amsel should know about it. The housekeeper said she was more concerned that the children had gotten separated, and vowed to keep them on a shorter leash next time. But even as she told them not to worry overly much about the strange man, she continued to interrogate them about every last detail. She made them repeat over and over again what they’d seen, almost as if she were looking for holes in their story, but there really wasn’t much else to tell. Like Max, Carter had been able to make out only the shoes and part of a torn black coat.
Carter could tell that Max was still sore at him for wandering away in the first place, and more for telling Mrs. Amsel about it afterward. Whenever he tried to make conversation, she glowered at him, but he honestly hadn’t meant to wander that far. It was just easy to get lost in all the crowds.
He did finally locate the boy from the play. As they were walking home, Carter spotted him sharing a pizza with his parents at an outdoor café. Out of costume, the boy looked to be about Carter’s age, or maybe a year or two younger, even. As they got closer, the boy must’ve noticed Carter staring at him, because he waved. He seemed friendly enough, so Carter, Mrs. Amsel and Max stopped at their table.
“You were really good in the play,” said Carter. The boy didn’t speak English, so Mrs. Amsel translated.
At once, the boy’s face lit up with pleasure, and his mother reached over and planted a proud kiss on his cheek. “Danke,” said the boy.
“Bitte,” answered Carter. He’d picked up enough German to say you’re welcome, at least. Then the boy stood up and reached out to shake Carter’s hand. That’s when Carter saw that the boy didn’t have any crutches and that he had no problem stepping over his chair to get to Carter. Of course. The boy was an actor, and the crutches had been part of the act, too. Carter surprised himself at how disappointed and, in some way, just a little betrayed he felt.
Then there was an uncomfortable moment when the boy noticed Carter’s limp for the first time and, worse, Carter saw him notice it.
Since they were already outside the café, Mrs. Amsel went inside to buy them a pizza for dinner. Carter suggested they get it to go; he no longer felt like staying around and chatting. As they left, Carter called goodbye to the boy and his parents. He could say that in German, too.
Mrs. Amsel complained that there was a criminal lack of plates and flatware back at the rental house, so she picked up paper plates and cups on the wa
y home. Back in the kitchen, she served up the pizza on disposable plates decorated with winged horses in party hats. As she passed a slice to his sister, Carter had to smile because he couldn’t think of anything more un-Max-like than those cute horses with wings.
“Great plates,” said Max. “I would’ve loved these when I was five.”
“They were on sale,” Mrs. Amsel said. “It was winged horses or robots.”
“Robots are cool,” mumbled Carter as he shoved a slice into his mouth. Why bother waiting for a plate?
“I’m surprised you could find anything that wasn’t decorated with rats in this town,” said Max. “Anyway, they’re Pegasuses.”
Carter stopped chewing and looked at her. “Wha—?”
“That’s what the flying horses are called,” Max said, shrugging. “Greek myth. The favored horses of Zeus. Or maybe the plural is Pegasi, I’m not sure.”
Carter continued to stare.
“What?” she said. “He’s my dad, too. I’m bound to pick up some useless nerd trivia from this family, whether I like it or not.”
“I think it’s very interesting,” said Mrs. Amsel, and Carter went back to chewing. He couldn’t be sure, but he’d thought that maybe, for just a second, Max had managed to get the Crouch to lighten up a bit.
After that, everybody relaxed a little, the play and the shadow man finally forgotten. Before long, there was nothing left on the table but a few pizza crusts. Mrs. Amsel produced one of her homemade cakes for dessert, and not even Max could think of anything to complain about that. As Mrs. Amsel cut into the cake, she swore in German as a bead of sweat dripped off her chin dangerously close to the cake. “Oh, pardon me,” she said. “I am melting in this weather.”
“I think there’s an air conditioner,” said Max. “The thermostat’s on the wall over there, but I haven’t tried it out.”
“I wouldn’t want to turn it on without your father’s permission,” said Mrs. Amsel.
“It’s not like he’s going to care, or even notice,” said Max.