by Matthew Cody
“I’ll do it!” said Carter, jumping up. He liked to push buttons.
Carter picked up his piece of cake with his fingers and shoved a full half of it into his mouth as he left the table. As he passed his sister, he opened his mouth to show her his “see food.”
“Neanderthal,” Max whispered at him, and Carter snorted a small cloud of cake crumbs at her. He examined the thermostat for a minute and then punched a few unmarked buttons, ones he hoped were Cool and On.
“Let me get the window,” said Max, and she shut and locked the kitchen window as a muffled metallic clunk came from somewhere under the floor, followed by the hum of cool air wafting through the vents.
And then something else. A faint sound, but one that definitely didn’t belong. Like the pitter-patter of raindrops on a tin roof. “What’d you do?” said Max. “Break it?”
But the noise was already changing, getting louder. “Ah!” said Mrs. Amsel. “What is that sound?”
Carter listened at the vent. The noise was coming from somewhere below, growing louder and louder until the raindrops sounded like a hailstorm inside the walls. Carter put his face up to the vent and peered inside.
What he saw caused him to cry out and tumble backward on his bad leg, barely dodging the air vent when it came bursting off the wall as hundreds, if not thousands, of beady eyes, filthy whiskers and wormlike tails spilled from that dark tunnel. Rats, pouring into the kitchen. So, so many rats.
Everyone started screaming as the floor disappeared beneath the wave of rodents. Mrs. Amsel shrieked louder than anyone else as she hauled herself up onto her chair. Max and Carter tried to kick away the mass of wriggling rodents at their feet, but when they kicked one, three more took its place.
One part of Carter’s brain—unfortunately, the part mostly in control—was as hysterical as everyone else’s. The rats, with their sleek bodies and grotesquely human-like hands, inspired some kind of instinctive revulsion, a blind fear. But somewhere else in the back of his head a memory shook loose, a fact he’d read somewhere that had stuck.
What is a horde of rats called? he asked himself. Oh yes, it’s called a mischief. What a perfect name for what they are. A mischief of rats.
Max was calling Carter’s name, snapping him back to the here and now. “Help me get the door!” she was shouting.
The rats were massing up against the front door. Piling over each other as they launched themselves at the wooden frame, scratching and biting at the cracks. Max had managed to put the coat stand between her and the growing tangle of scurrying bodies.
And what was Carter supposed to do about all this?
Then he saw what she was pointing at—the doorknob was just high enough to be beyond the reach of biting teeth. With a yell, Carter grabbed for the handle. Max stepped out of her hiding place to kick a path clear for him with the heavy black boots she wore everywhere. Carter grabbed the knob and swung the door open wide.
Like water escaping from a punctured tank, the rats poured out of the house. En masse, they streamed into the fading day, crossed the street and disappeared into the sewer grates. It was an almost orderly retreat, if not quite done in single file, and within minutes they had all vanished. The street itself was strangely quiet, empty of traffic. The only evidence of the rats having been there at all was the ruined vent in the kitchen and thousands of dirty rat paw prints crisscrossing the floor.
No one spoke at first, and the only sound to be heard was their own heavy breathing. Carter couldn’t take his eyes off the street. Not a soul was in sight, and there wasn’t a hint of a breeze to disturb the near-perfect stillness. Where had everyone gone?
As if in answer to his unspoken question, a car turned the corner. Then another. Voices echoed from nearby as one of the neighbors laughed at her evening television program. Someone else’s radio was up too loud. It was as if the town had paused to hold its breath and was only now letting it out. As his sister joined him at the doorway, Carter watched her look to the sewer grates where the rats had fled, then over at the storefront where she’d seen the man earlier. He knew what she was thinking, but it was empty now.
Carter and his sister exchanged a long look; then they turned back to Mrs. Amsel. Their housekeeper was white and shaking, but unhurt.
“Mein Gott,” she said. “Are you children all right?”
They both nodded, standing there dumbly. Finally, Carter leaned over and whispered to his sister, “So rats, huh?”
Sleep was far, far away. How could Max sleep when the day kept playing over and over again in her brain in a loop? Every time she closed her eyes, she saw the rats swarming around her, and her heart beat so loudly in her ears that she wrapped a pillow around her head to try and drown it out. How had she not heard it before? How did she manage to make it through every day without going deaf from the ceaseless racket of her own heartbeat?
Crazy, late-night thoughts.
Carter, on the other hand, had proven once again that he could fall asleep at any time and under any circumstances. After long car rides, their mother and father still had to carry him up to bed, unconscious, like a baby. You could strip him down and change him into his pajamas and he wouldn’t so much as twitch.
Mrs. Amsel insisted on staying until their father came home, although when that would be was anyone’s guess. He’d had his phone turned off all evening, and even though their housekeeper had left him at least five frantic messages in a mix of panicked English and German, they still hadn’t heard from him by the time she shooed the children up to bed. By the third time Max had gotten up for a glass of water, Mrs. Amsel had fallen asleep in a chair by the living room window, her chin resting on her chest. Max climbed back into her bed and stared at the ceiling. It is one of the loneliest feelings in the world, to be the only one awake in a house full of sleeping people.
After a couple of hours, Max decided that lying in her bed wide-awake was pointless. She’d go down and wake Mrs. Amsel, and tell the old housekeeper to go home and get some real rest. Max might as well wait up for her father, since she wasn’t sleeping anyway, and poor Mrs. Amsel had already been through enough for one day.
Max tiptoed out of the bedroom, mindful of the squeaking boards in the hallway, and made her way down the stairs. She didn’t know why she felt the need to be quiet, since her brother wouldn’t waken for anything less than a siren going off next to his face. But an old house at night feels like it deserves silence, somehow.
On this quiet night, the moon cast pools of blue light through the downstairs windows, but the floors were mostly hidden in inky blackness. Just dark enough to hide a rat or two.
Max was very aware of her exposed little toes as she pattered across the lightless hallway, toward the living room. She wished she had her boots on, but who thinks to put on boots just to go downstairs?
She fumbled for the light switch on the living room wall but only succeeded in toppling over a small vase of flowers on one of the end tables. This was silly. Her imagination had worked itself into such a panic that she couldn’t even find a simple light switch. That’s when she noticed the figure framed by the moonlight. It was a tall shape, sitting upright and alert in the chair against the window. It was facing her, and it was definitely not Mrs. Amsel.
Max might have cried out, except that she caught a whiff of something, the smoke of her father’s tobacco pipe. The bowl glowed orange in the dark as he inhaled. “It’s all right, Max,” he said. “It’s only me.”
Her father turned on a small table lamp, and Max had to squint as her vision briefly danced with purple bulb-shaped spots. “I didn’t hear you come home,” she said.
“I tried to be quiet,” said her father. “I didn’t want to wake you and your brother.” Her father smiled at her, glasses perched on his forehead and his pipe sticking out between the tobacco-stained whiskers of his mustache and beard. Max knew that the same kids back in New York who teased Carter about his leg also made fun of him because their father was older than the other kids’
dads—they called him grandpa. Max’s sore point wasn’t their father’s age but his slovenly appearance. He would often get so caught up in his work that he would forget to change into clean clothes or comb his hair. Maybe it wasn’t his fault, or maybe he just couldn’t be bothered to remember. Whatever the case, tonight he looked more rumpled than usual. There were dark bags under his eyes that shouldn’t have been there, and Max didn’t want to know how many days in a row he’d been wearing that same sweat-stained shirt.
This wouldn’t have been a problem if their mother had been around. She was always the one making him close his books at night and reminding him to go to bed at a reasonable hour. Carter took after their father in that way—always thinking, always off dreaming somewhere among the clouds. It was Mom who kept everyone tethered to the ground.
“I couldn’t sleep anyway,” said Max, and she gestured in the direction of the kitchen.
“Yes, Mrs. Amsel filled me in on everything,” said her father. “I’m so sorry, Max. I had my phone off because I was working in the special collection over at the hall of records. Did you know that some of the documents there are so old you have to wear surgical gloves?…Anyway, I’m sorry.”
Max shrugged. “Mrs. Amsel taped some tinfoil over the vent. I don’t think that’s going to cut it, though.”
“I told her to go home and get some sleep,” said her father, nodding. “I had to practically push her out the door. And I told her to take tomorrow off, no discussion.” Their father was going to make Carter and her stay home alone? With the rats and everything?
He read the look of alarm on his daughter’s face. “I’m staying here, too,” he said. “I called the landlord to tell him about what happened, and he’s sending over an exterminator in the morning. Hopefully one who speaks English.”
Her father sounded perfectly calm, even reassuring, as he talked, but Max noticed that he kept sneaking little glances out the window, as if he were watching for something out there. Or someone.
“Dad, why were you sitting here in the dark?”
“I was just thinking,” he said, tapping the bowl of his pipe. The tobacco had gone out. “It’s too hot upstairs and, well, I don’t feel like trying out the AC again.”
Max nodded. The upstairs was sweltering, but that didn’t explain why he had the lights off, and the way he kept checking over his shoulder made her suspect that he wasn’t being one hundred percent honest with her. Max had an idea what he was looking for.
“Dad, did Mrs. Amsel tell you about the man I saw today?”
Max’s father stiffened in his chair. “Yes, she did,” he said. “She told me that you two disobeyed her instructions to stay together, too. Max, you should know better than to let your brother wander off alone.”
Her father was trying to change the subject by playing the part of the scolding parent, but Max wasn’t going to let him get away with it. “Dad, were you sitting here in the dark because you were looking out for that man?”
Max’s father leaned forward like he might protest but then sank back into his chair, deflated. “I don’t know who that was,” he said quietly. “And Mrs. Amsel is probably right that it was just a homeless person.”
Max went to the window. The streetlights were on but there was hardly anyone around. Not anyone that she could see, at least.
“Sit down, kiddo,” her father said, and he pulled up a footstool. Kiddo. He hadn’t called her that in some time. Her father lowered the window blinds.
“You know my job’s not a dangerous one,” he said. “And I would never do anything to put you and your brother at any kind of risk, you know that, right?”
“Um, no offense, Dad,” said Max, “but you collect fairy tales. I used to tell kids you were a spy when I was little just so that I wouldn’t get picked on at recess.”
Her father nodded.
“You’re not, are you?” Max asked quickly.
“No,” laughed her father. “I’m not a spy. Paper cuts are about as perilous as my job usually gets. But still, in the stuffy world of academia, there’s money to be made. Even fame, for those very lucky few who manage to discover something new.”
“Like what?”
Her father pushed his glasses farther up on his forehead and leaned closer. “Shakespeare wrote thirty-seven plays in his lifetime that have survived. But we know from records that he wrote more than that. We have the title of at least one, called Love’s Labor’s Won, but no copy survives, at least not one that’s been discovered. How much do you think that play would be worth today?”
“A lot?”
“Priceless. And the person who found it…well, they’d be a rock star. In the bookish sense, of course.”
Max frowned, considering this. “But you teach folklore. Have you found some lost fairy tale or something?”
“Maybe, at least I think so,” said her father, his voice quickening. “It’s why I came all the way here to Hamelin. As I was researching my book on the Pied Piper legend, I met a man who showed me something remarkable.” Her father stood up and peeked out through the blinds; then he began pacing around the room.
“I’ve told you before how the Grimm brothers only wrote down the stories that they’d been hearing for years? They took the oral tales of this region in particular, stories of the dark forest and the mountains, and collected them in books. But those stories had been around for hundreds of years before that. Well, take a look at this.”
Her father opened his briefcase. It was a sentimental leather case, with a well-worn handle and brass latches that had turned green over the years. Very gently, carefully, her father pulled out a yellowed piece of paper protected by a plastic cover. There was writing down the middle, and a scrollwork of illustrations along the top and bottom, like a page in a book. It looked very old.
“How’s your German coming along?”
“I can order a hot dog with sauerkraut,” said Max.
“Well, then allow me to translate. What you’re looking at is the table of contents from a very early, very limited edition of the Grimm brothers’ book Children’s and Household Tales. We know that there were seven versions of the book published, with the last one in 1857. But if this table of contents is authentic, then there was an eighth version—one that predated all the others, and it’s one with a small but significant difference.”
Her father pointed to a line on the ancient, yellowed page. Besides being in German, the ink was so faded and the handwriting so archaic that she couldn’t possibly read it.
“This table of contents lists a story that doesn’t appear in any other of the surviving editions,” explained her father. “A story called ‘The Piper and the Peddler.’ ”
“Doesn’t sound too great to me.”
“But it is. If this is a lost tale, a folk story that was edited out for some reason, that would be the find of a lifetime.”
“I get it,” said Max. “That would be a super big deal in your field. So you came here to Hamelin to find this lost fairy tale. And did you? Did you find it?”
“Not yet,” said her father quietly, and again he glanced over at the window. “But I might have found something even more incredible.”
He took Max’s hand and pulled her close, as if whatever he was about to say, he didn’t want to say it too loudly. “All these stories,” he said. “Generations of stories, and they all started the same way—as lessons. Made-up fables designed to teach us right from wrong, that sort of thing.”
“Right, like don’t eat a witch’s gingerbread house.”
“But what if one of those stories wasn’t just a fable?” said her father. “What if one of those fairy tales wasn’t a fairy tale at all, and what if I could prove it?”
Max pulled back a little from her father. Something in his stare, in those sleep-starved eyes, made her worried for him. And not just because he was sounding more and more like he really thought he was in some kind of spy thriller. He didn’t look good, and he didn’t look healthy. Again Max wished her
mother were here, now more than ever.
“So…what did you find?” she asked cautiously.
Her father pulled another document from inside his briefcase. If anything, this one looked older than the page from the Brothers Grimm book. “A page from a young Hameliner’s journal,” said her father. “Dated 1284—the same year the children of Hamelin were supposedly taken. The story the boy tells is outlandish, of course. He was probably the victim of mental illness, or maybe it was a case of mass hysteria. Or maybe he was just a very creative liar, but it is still the undeniable origin of the story of the Pied Piper. It’s as if someone had found the story of Little Red Riding Hood signed by the author!”
“And that’s an even bigger deal?”
Her father nodded. “And it’s real, Max. I’ve shared it with a few experts, enough to verify its authenticity.” Her father stood up and crossed to the window yet again, peering through the blinds.
“I haven’t told many people, but I suppose if the wrong sort of person heard about it…” Her father paused. “After Mrs. Amsel told me about what you’d seen today, about the man across the street, and the one in the plaza, it got me thinking.”
“Wait,” said Max. “You don’t think that homeless guy I saw is after your research?”
“No,” said her father, sighing. “I don’t know. Who knows what people are capable of if they want something badly enough. Paying people to spy on us, even setting a bunch of rats loose in our house to scare us off. All I know is, I don’t want you and your brother staying here any longer.”
“You’re sending us away?”
“Back to New York. I shouldn’t have brought you in the first place.”
Max wasn’t sure how she should respond. Up until this very moment, Max’s relationship with her father could have best been described as distracted. He was a kind man, witty and generous when the mood took him, but he was rarely present. He might be physically in the same room with you, but part of him was always lost in his books, in someone else’s stories. Even as he asked how his children’s day had been, even as he kissed Max good night on the forehead, she was never sure if he was thinking about her or if he was thinking about tomorrow’s lecture. But right now, he was here—all of him, here. Max was being invited to share in his obsession, and therefore she had all of his attention.
