The Piper of New Hamelin

New fiction by Anthony Head. "All this strange business had started with the rats..."

Photo by Edoardo Bortoli on Unsplash

I finally recognized the familiar rhythms of the coast and opened my eyes. Gentle waves pushed up the sandy shore before slithering back into the bay. Evening’s sunlight spread like gold upon the water. My first thought was that all this strange business had started with the rats.

“Where is everyone?” There was a child of perhaps seven years and her parents standing in the road before me.

“They’re all gone,” I said. Forgetting my pain I led them to my house, which shared the same view to the bay as the rest of the village. Everything appeared exactly as it had on the day I’d left, whenever that was, except the sand and salt that coated the windows and gathered into shallow piles at the corners.

“This is New Hamelin,” the father kept repeating, “isn’t it?”

“New Hamelin, yes,” I said, unlatching the door. He didn’t speak the old language but I understood enough of his words. “If the year is 1848, then, yes, this is New Hamelin.”

Several heavy moments passed in silence as we all watched each other.

“We are very confused,” the mother said. “The year is also—”

But the father interrupted the mother, “We left Bremen aboard the Wilhelmina on June 26th—”

The mother nodded along but said, “I think it was the 22nd, but we thought our destination was going to be Galveston—”

“—during the cholera outbreak—”

“but the weather forced our ship to Karlshaven.”

“—barely escaped with our lives!”

“Indian Point,” I corrected the mother, softly. “Karlshaven is now called Indian Point. If the year is 1848.”

The mother swept the room with her eyes. Tiny drifts of sand were everywhere. She pulled her child close to her skirt.

“Are we in Texas?”

I nodded.

The father looked through the salty window toward the bay and said they’d been walking for the past three days along the shore, guided by a young boy, only to find the village deserted.

“We slept on the ground,” said the mother, following her husband’s gaze through the window. “Not a soul to be found until you—and in your condition.”

I wore no shoes to hide my cut and bruised feet. My swollen leg pressed through the threads of my trousers. Such dirty hands and bloodied face invited nothing but suspicion from my guests.

“This is New Hamelin?”

I nodded.

“Where is everyone?”

“They’re all gone,” I repeated. “Everyone’s gone.”

They followed me to the kitchen, where I brushed salt off the kettle and looked for something to feed them. We sat at the small wooden table. The little girl reached for a cracker from the tin and I told them, “It all started with the rats.”

***

One night not so long ago, a terrible storm washed ashore at Indian Point and the next day New Hamelin was awash with more rats than rain. The plague of vermin tormented us for many days. But then, just as suddenly, came the night when the wind blew across the bay with shrill notes we’d never heard before that day. By morning, New Hamelin slithered with blood-red snakes filling their bellies with rats. All day they hunted and fed and dozed in the sunshine then slithered into the grassy dunes at night.

In time the snakes finished their feasting. When they departed at sunset—and without a single rat to be found—we rang the chapel bell with our gratitude. But our fortunes would prove unworthy of any bell, lest it be named Death Knell.

After sundown a woman appeared, not of hardy stock but dressed in the manner of a man. Truly, it was safer for a woman to travel in such stealth, but then she gave herself away with the gaudiness of her clothes! A scarlet shirt. One pant-leg green, the other yellow. The cloak and cap were black with white specks, like the sky at midnight. Her boots were the color of flames.

New Hamelin does not sit at any crossroads. We do little business with others and don’t take in travelers. We are not a welcoming place, yet the visitor’s sudden presence brought us all out to the road. Taking from her cloak a slender wooden fife, and with her back to the bay, she began to play. Softly the notes floated across the darkening twilight while the oxen mood and the children danced. One of those damned serpents slithered from beneath my house and across the road, right up to the piper where it coiled around her leg.

“Be not bereft. I will deliver you from this plague.” She spoke the antique Romanian language, but some of us knew enough words and asked her of the price she required.

And what a price! When the mayor told the piper that she asked far more than our meager means could spare, she said, “Pay me now or it’ll be the worse for you.”

Uncoiling from her leg, the snake slithered back toward my house. We all parted as it furrowed through the sandy dirt and disappeared beneath the porch.

The piper returned the way she came, never playing a note.

In the morning, hundreds of snakes returned to grow fat on our chickens. Hundreds more joined them the next day and all the cats from our barns and houses and even from the fields went missing. Jacob Donecker discovered his ox was gone, and Wilhelm Sievers lost a horse. One of those foul creatures slithered across the road with its belly filled with the mayor’s dog. At night they filled our houses, our cabinets, and closets. They burrowed beneath the floorboards and in between the walls.

Beneath the haunted moon, the piper appeared on the road. The mayor repeated that our village was poor, but when the piper turned on her heels we all roared, “We will pay!”

The piper cocked her head and smiled. She played a few frivolous notes for the children—and oh how they danced. “I return tomorrow.” She left toward the hills with the children dancing after, ignoring their parents’ cries. But then they stopped when she disappeared, as if becoming the night itself.

At day’s first light we all gathered at the mayor’s house, in relief and in agreement that no serpent was to be found.

After a time, a boy appeared on the road, urging us to follow him. I recognized the boy, who was from Indian Point. Several years earlier two women came and said he’d been found where the San Zavala River flows into the bay and asked if he belonged to us. Now he’d returned alone to New Hamelin, perhaps eight or nine years old, and led us to a spot above the shore, where we saw a fantastic crease in the sand. The deep, broad scar between the dunes and the ebbing morning tide had surely been carved by hundreds of snakes slithering toward their watery doom. The boy left us to keep watch on the bay and the deep scar all day until the evening tide came and washed it away.

The piper appeared on the road at sundown and held forth her empty hand.

“Let us speak inside,” urged the mayor.

The piper smiled broadly and followed us to the mayor’s house, where many villagers could squeeze within.

“Let’s not piddle away the night,” said the piper. “Twice I solved your problem but ask only one payment.” When the mayor began to object she objected further. “Did you not hear me in the night calling the snakes which did rid your town of rats?”

“She called the serpents!” someone shouted.

“She must have called the rats!” I shouted louder.

“Two plagues for the price of one!” The piper shouted the loudest.

“Evil begets evil!” I whispered to the mayor.

The piper turned toward me and raised her instrument to her lips.

“Jonalz!”

***

I told my visitors that I knew nothing of what really happened that night. It was nearly dawn when I’d finally opened my eyes at the mayor’s house.

“He was shaking me, repeating my name,” I told the mother and father. “I remember them lifting me from the floor.”

“Jonalz? That’s your name?” the mother asked me, shifting in her chair.

“Jonalz Mattern.” I nodded.

The father leaned forward, placing his cup on the saucer. “I am Hermann Stockert. This is my wife, Ingra.” Their child had slipped to the back room and was fast asleep on my bed. “What happened to you?”

“It was her, the piper!” I leaned back in my chair, trying to bring forward in my mind the music she had played just for me, but it was like trying to throw a net around a beautiful sad dream.

The mother wiped a tear running down my cheek that I didn’t know was there. She then filled our cups from the kettle.

“I was told she played but a single note before I fell. And in her rage she doubled her price. The mayor refused as he pointed at me on the floor—raving that no God-fearing man or woman of New Hamelin would ever pay the devil for any deeds! Bitter and angry, the piper departed saying, ‘It’ll be the worse for you.’”

The mother stayed silent as she watched my eyes.

The father stood and turned again toward the window. The sun was nearly set but its fiery light reflected off the water onto the clouds. “But where is everyone?”

***

There were 13 children in New Hamelin, and after three days, during which nothing unusual happened and no calamity befell our village, they all returned to their chores. But when they played they stayed close to the chapel at the road’s end and were forbidden to go farther into the prairie where they once roamed freely as white-tailed deer.

On the fourth day we found young Gerhard Oidtmann on the road, the skin of his right forearm was swollen and blackened around two crusting punctures. The boy of just nine years was taken to the mayor’s house where he died in his mother’s arms that night.

In haste, every villager scoured their homes and gathered their gold, silver, and precious stones. A large sack was brought forth and every item of New Hamelin’s wealth was tossed in it, and still we had less than the piper’s demand. We placed the sack in the road where the piper had first appeared, and there it remained for a day and a night.

Just before dawn Petula Gothel screamed. That was followed by Witling and Catherine Stromberg shouting frightfully for their daughters. Our village was filled with the desperate cries of parents longing for their children, all of whom went missing from their beds.

Gathering at the mayor’s house we roared and hollered until Jan Brahms came running in shouting that the sack was no longer in the road. In our rush we pushed and shoved each other to the spot where the sack had been placed, only to find the boy from Indian Point standing in its place.

The mayor assailed the boy, demanding to hear everything he knew about the missing children and the missing sack of New Hamelin’s wealth. But the boy only urged us, as before, to follow him to the bay where we saw a trail of tiny scattered footprints between the dunes and the ebbing morning tide, the divots were surely made by a dozen children dancing toward their watery doom.

We fell into grief.

After the boy had slipped away, I walked along the sand in the direction of Indian Point, which is how I spotted a single set of bootprints leading away from the water. I cried, “Here!” and followed the prints back toward the dunes and thick coastal grasses. Just beyond where the bootprints ended lay the empty sack. And just beyond the sack, in the abandoned nest of a piping plover, lay a delicate silver spoon. Gerhard’s mother screamed when she saw it was her son’s christening spoon and nearly collapsed.

Roland St. John found his gold ring in a clump of grass a short distance from the spoon, and then spotted a silver crucifix on a chain, swinging in the breeze from an oak tree.

“Here!” August Apel called out from thirty paces away. “It’s my wife’s locket!”

“Here!” Briar Rose shouted down from the prairie mounds. “My uncle gave me this jade bracelet!”

We kept finding our precious items, glinting in the sunshine, and then tossing them into the sack. This lasted a day and a night until there was nothing more to find. But we had travelled far from our homes and were lost under the cold night sky.

I alone heard the piper’s tune that night. Those melancholy notes filled my head until I awoke, shivering in the grass. But the music was, in truth, a woman dressed in white, weeping as she walked before us. Her cries were surely caused by the loss of her own children. We followed her into a woods. At every turn we devised to catch up but she always appeared farther away, so we kept walking for two days and two nights in the wild, unexplored, and endless woods.

When our procession came to a clearing we discovered that the woman’s wailing was, in truth, the piper’s music. She sat with her back against a hillock, playing her woeful tune.

With tingling ear and solemn face the mayor placed the sack of riches at the piper’s boots.

“Light as a feather,” she insisted before lifting the sack above her head.

The mayor was barely to be restrained as he demanded to know about the children.

“You owe the full payment on a debt that was promised long before you were born. Nonetheless, it is time you payed up.”

The mayor knelt, beseeching the piper, “We have nothing left to give.”

“Then it will be the worse for you.”

“What more?” we all cried. “We offer it freely!”

And it was then that a bargain was struck.

The piper never moved nor reached for her fife, yet the mob was soon within a frenzy of dancing, surely as if a great brass band was playing for the bishop’s birthday! There arose a great clamor of despair as my neighbors and friends danced toward a yawning cave entrance in the hillock.

All but one fell under the piper’s soft magic spell, and it was I who cried out to stop their tragic dance. The mayor was the last to disappear into the cave, tears of agony flowing as he danced into the darkness.

The piper then faced me and lifted her instrument to her lips.

***

“Truly, I know not how I returned, nor how I’ve earned such condition.” I gestured at my ripped clothes but the mother looked away. “She played a tune just for me, which both led and pursued me all the way home.”

But the music remained locked inside my mind. A lingering enchantment with ancient notes crying Hameln and homeland. And Weser and Poppenberg—children dancing in the countryside. When I try to tell the mother of this tune it slips away, leaving only echoes of a melancholy melody that become the sound of coastal waves breaking on the shore.

“But where are the children?” The little girl had awakened and was sitting at the table with us.

I didn’t know the right answer. The mother was appalled. The father look worried.

Of a sudden, we heard the chapel bell pealing and we ran to the end of the road. The little girl pushed open the front door. Gerhardt stood in the vestibule swinging on the rope attached to the great iron bell above, the puncture wounds missing from his arm. The village’s missing children stood in a circle around him.

Then all the children filed quietly outside, looking safe and content if also a bit lost. They asked nothing about their missing parents. They were hungry.

I watched the mother and father and their daughter quietly follow the children back along the village road. When I turned to close the chapel door I saw the cross of pure gold, gleaming almost unbearably in the small sanctuary. It had been with us for so long that none of us even thought of it when the bag was being filled to pay the piper. I stood gazing upon the precious relic of our past, and the piper’s tune returned to my mind.

I rushed to the golden cross, with the music growing louder, and pulled it from the wall. On the back was a forgotten inscription in an archaic script:

Withhold nothing to square your debts

For the devil never plays fair.

A.D. 1284

I placed the cross of gold in the road where the piper had first appeared. It stands there to this day.

The end.

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Anthony Head mostly writes about Texas.

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