The Piper's Price

by Audrey Greathouse

  She put a finger on her chin and looked around as if thinking very hard on the subject. “I bet there will be rats,” she decided. “A coin is a tiny thing for them to carry. It’ll be like the final test. Magic things always come in threes.”

  “Then he’ll appear?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  Gwen remained skeptical, but didn’t voice a word of doubt. If belief counted for anything, as it often did with magic, she didn’t want to tread on her sister’s optimistic appetite for the impossible.

  “First, I think we should ask him where they took Hollyhock.” Rosemary held up one finger, and then two as she continued, “Second, we should ask him to help Neverland.”

  Gwen felt the coin in her hand—its reeded edges were worn down to a nearly smooth rim. Strange words—in Latin or German, she couldn’t tell—were etched around the cross pattern on the front of the dull, golden penny. “No,” she told her sister, “we should talk to him about business first. We need to get his attention.”

  Rosemary agreed, amenable to anything in her current mood.

  The older girl was less confident. She tried to internalize Lasiandra’s cavalier attitude toward the Piper. The mermaids weren’t afraid of him, why should she be?

  But she was not magical. Not inherently. She had no defense against the Piper. She was proceeding on the faith that his greed would make him a predictable, rational entity.

  The shops cleared out and the last of the lights clicked off inside. The standing lampposts in the plaza were dim orbs of light in contrast to the totality of the night’s darkness. The sky wasn’t the star-studded blackness of Neverland, but rather the dark grey of clouded-over reality.

  Gwen wound the music box and began their summoning song one last time. Rosemary skittered up to the edge of the fountain and stood beside her sitting sister, scouting for nearby rats. The music chimed, seeming slower. Gwen’s heart beat at a similar pace. She felt eerily calm, aware she had no options but this unnerving course of action. As the music played, she sang once more:

  Dally gordon apple gongsing dinner

  in bellies of better blooming blue bells

  Happenstance heroes halv hon blow away

  Keppling yellow mouse issn really tells

  The rats came creeping slower this last night. They had a cautious and methodical manner to their movement as they drew near. They spilled out from every conceivable cranny of the shopping center’s architecture. The trash cans, gutters, pipes, planters, and roof poured the rodents out into the courtyard toward the girls at the fountain. Little ones came up from sewer grates, others poked out of utility boxes and cracks under the stores. From nests in crawlspaces, chimneys, and vents, more than a hundred rats came marching out to confront the girls. They ordered themselves, naturally finding their positions in a vast military-like formation.

  The regiment of rats disturbed Gwen, and she cut her song short. There were already too many for her comfort. She didn’t know what would happen if she kept singing.

  “Wonderful,” Rosemary whispered above her, still standing on the fountain’s rim.

  Gwen drew her feet up, away from the rats gathered beneath her. She still clutched the tiny guilder. She tried to be as impressed as Rosemary, but now her heart drummed in her chest. It had never occurred to her how much she disliked rats until she’d been charged with finding the Piper.

  The man himself was nowhere in sight. The girls scanned the courtyard while the rats waited on patient claws. Gwen didn’t trust the circumstances. She reached into her pocket and felt about for the end of the thread that Irene had given her. Without looking at her hands, for fear of tripping up her mind with the invisible thread, she wrapped the coin in the magic thread several times, knotting it tight around the gold piece. The rats didn’t comprehend what was happening, and although Rosemary stared and tried to make sense of it, she didn’t make a sound. She knew when magic was afoot, and she knew better than to speak and break a spell in the making.

  The spool still firmly in her pocket, Gwen lowered the coin down to the rat nearest her. Aware of how close the quick creature was to her face, she suppressed the fear she wanted to wince with. “Send the Piper. Here’s the first of his payment. Make sure he gets this, and make sure he comes.” She didn’t know if her words meant anything to the rat, but he snatched the coin between his teeth all the same.

  A shrill chorus of squeaking began as the rat militia dissolved into a frenzy. With rabid intensity and frantic motions, they stampeded away from the fountain, tripping over each other in their haste.

  The girls lost sight of their courier immediately.

  Had there been light, they could have seen the shine of the guilder—remarkably polished for a coin that was certainly hundreds of years old. In the night, it was impossible to discern which of the mad rats was dashing away with their coin. This event didn’t feel like the previous nights; the squeaking and squealing of the rats suggested some sort of horrible distress… or betrayal.

  Rosemary’s eyes went wide. On some frightened instinct, she started to back up away from the rats, all inefficiently fleeing. She started to step off the ledge of the fountain, but Gwen saw the motion and sprung up to grab Rosemary’s hands and pull her back to balance.

  “What’s going on?” the little girl shouted.

  “I don’t know. It’ll be okay.”

  None of them went for easy hiding places again. The furry monsters ran around buildings and toward the horizons beyond them. The vast rat population that had congregated in the town center’s plaza somehow knew, just as Rosemary did, that magic came in threes. The furious flurry died down as the rats again disappeared. The shopping plaza’s courtyard became silent and still in a way that indicated the rats had kept running even once out of sight. The event over, they scattered back to whatever lands and nests they’d originated from.

  In a minute’s time, there was nothing to suggest that anything had ever happened. The girls waited several minutes more, sitting close together for comfort in the cold and uneasy night. There was no sign of the Piper.

  “He was supposed to come.” Tears started to swell in Rosemary’s eyes, and her little nose gave way to a series of sniffles. “Why wouldn’t he come? We got all the things he wanted!”

  “It’s okay,” Gwen assured her, patting at the poof of her sister’s voluminous hair before wrapping her arm around the girl’s small body. “I have a plan. I thought he might play tricky.”

  Rosemary wiped her eyes. It was a dramatic gesture, since she hadn’t actually started crying. “Really?”

  “Really. Now follow my lead and we’ll see if we can’t find him on our own terms.”

  Gwen pulled her spool out of her pocket, still averting her eyes. There is thread there, she told herself. Don’t look down and try to prove yourself wrong.

  The spool had rapidly unwound as the rat dashed away, but the magic thread had neither run out nor tangled. Gwen felt the invisible cord between her fingers and re-wound it as she followed it.

  “What is tha—Oooh…” Rosemary cooed as she reached out and touched the silky string. “Oh, I can see it now! It’s so pretty and glittery.”

  Gwen looked down, wondering if moonlight or some other quality of the night had brought the enchanted thread into view. She saw nothing. What Rosemary could clearly admire once aware of, Gwen couldn’t see even as she held it. She took a deep breath and tried to force self-conscious thoughts out of her mind. She was not a child enough to tap into the whimsical beauty of everything, so what? She could still do this. She was the one who thought to track the coin, not just hand it over with blind naivety. She had some strengths unique to her age.

  Once Rosemary saw the thread, she was reinvigorated and chased after it. Following Rosemary was easier than pulling at the thread to get a sense of where it went. Gwen pursued, her hands tiring faster than her feet as she jogged after her sister and wound the thread back around the spool fast enough to keep up with her sister’s impossible pace.


  It twisted between shops, around, and back again. They were running, as if in a wild goose chase, through the complex of retail buildings and restaurants.

  Rosemary came to an abrupt stop, just ahead of an uncovered passageway between buildings. A restaurant’s emergency exit and an employee’s-only door stood on opposite sides of the passage, creating it between their adobe-style walls and arched windows.

  The string went taut as they approached, closing in on the coin and the rat carrying it. She thought she saw the creature move in the shadows, but then felt her stomach rise and fall in one movement. In the center of the archway, the rat sat poised at the opening down into the passageway. It was an obvious dead end, and the animal seemed reluctant to dash down and corner itself. The golden guilder was no longer in its mouth. Gwen pulled the string again, but it went slack all at once.

  Without a word of discussion, the sisters parted from each other’s sides, sneaking left and right as they closed in on the alley. With no sudden motions, they approached the rat. It took a few steps before fear struck him and he urgently darted down the corridor. The thread still ran in the rat’s direction, and there was not another creature in sight. Rosemary took off sprinting after him, and her sister followed after.

  “Wait!” Rosemary pleaded, but the rat dashed headlong into the dead end and squeezed itself into a chink in the wall. Its body vanished, its twisting tail slipping away like the last stream of water down a drainpipe. The jagged crack was a passageway the girls could not follow down, and they found the end of the magic string on the alley floor. The coin was gone, and now the rat was, too. “But where’s Piper?” Rosemary called after the rat, desperate and distraught.

  Their efforts appeared fruitless, but Gwen’s instinct was to reassure her little sister and keep her calm. Before she could say anything, she felt a large hand clap over her mouth. Everything went black as a dark cloth came down over her, like a curtain engulfing her.

  Gwen struggled like a fish in a net, but the more she pushed, the tighter it got. She could hear Rosemary’s stifled screams on the other side. The folds of the fabric swallowed her as if she was trapped in a bag. She felt it under her feet, she felt it against her face. The hand had disappeared as soon as it had forced her into the bag. She was alone and unable to cry out. She pressed the cloth away from her enough to cry, “Rosemary!”

  When her confinement let up, it was instantaneous. The pressure and tightness went slack, and she found herself pushing a curtain. It blew away, and she stumbled down, barely managing to break her fall. Braced against the ground, she heard Rosemary shout as she plopped down beside her, rubbing her bottom and pouting at the disorienting experience.

  The curtain, still whirling in front of them, seemed to shrink—everything moved so fast, Gwen couldn’t be quite certain of what was happening. It froze, and she saw the hand clutching it out, the feet below it, and—at last—the man behind it.

  Still sitting where they’d fallen on the floor of the alley, the girls watched as he lifted his head slowly up and dropped the enchanted cape from out of his hand. It fell furiously, as if blown back by a violent wind, or as if it had some strange sentience of its own.

  The man glared at them with beady eyes. He looked disheveled in his dark clothing. He wore baggy trousers and a shirt with loose sleeves and tight cuffs. On his head, he had a wide-brimmed hat with a tiny, speckled feather. His waistcoat was almost invisible under its many brass buttons and colorful patches.

  “What are you children doing?” he snarled, looking almost archetypally villainous with his goatee and thin mustache. Everything this man did seemed to suggest he wanted to be left alone—from the way he hid to the way he groomed his facial hair.

  Of course, Gwen knew they had found the Piper, but she couldn’t quite bring herself to say it. She propped herself up on her hands, sitting a little higher while he towered over her. “We’re looking for the Piper.”

  He slid forward on his long legs and hunched down, his knees jutting out at odd angles as he crouched to look Gwen in the eye. “But having succeeded in that…” He spoke with a hesitation that suggested he was somehow restraining himself. “What then, my mäuschen?”

  Rosemary piped up, braver then Gwen until Piper put his intimidating gaze on her instead. “We need his help—we have a job for him!”

  His eyes narrowed, their darkness disappearing between the slits of his eyelids. “What children would need my services?” He spat the word children; Gwen wondered how much of his contempt for the two of them was rooted in their age, and his past experiences with children.

  Before Rosemary could say anything with her persistent tone of whimsy and joy—no doubt offensive to this embittered man—Gwen plucked up her courage and announced, “The children of Neverland.”

  Piper’s cape seemed to spring up before he did. “I knew it! That little bastard is hounding me again!”

  Rosemary cast an alarmed look at Gwen, shocked to hear a swear word. It seemed as though that utterance was the trigger for Rosemary’s trusting heart to doubt the integrity and kindness of this dark stranger.

  “He’s smart to send you to do his bidding—I would lead him straight to the bottom of the river if he’d had the nerve to come for me himself. The boy’s always known how to look out for his own skin…”

  He stormed off, back down the alley and away from the girls.

  “Wait,” Gwen cried, scrambling to her feet.

  “Give him my regards,” Piper sneered, turning to face them and drawing his cape up. “Or a swift kick to the gut.”

  “We can pay you!” Rosemary yelled, also rushing to get up.

  “I’ve heard that one before.”

  There was something about his posture that suggested a total control of the situation. He held his cape like a weapon, and Gwen conceived that he might use the cloth to disappear as quickly as he had appeared. Afraid he would transport himself away into the night in another second’s time, she blurted, “It’ll be Vanda who finds you next!”

  Piper dropped his cape.

  “What did you say, girl?”

  She backtracked through her mind, trying to recall what Lasiandra had told her about Piper and the mermaids. “The mermaids have long memories, Piper,” she bluffed, “and Neverland is their home, too.”

  He eyed her with grave distrust, but straightened his spine and stood tall. He slid over to the girls, never picking his feet up any more than he had to in order to walk. With fear curdling the edges of his voice, he asked, “Have you made a deal with the mermaids?”

  “No,” she huffed, taking command of the situation and getting comfortable in her bluff. “We’d rather not involve them, and we figured you’d be willing to listen to reason. Will you discuss the issue with us, or will we have to rely on other persuaders?”

  She’d taken that line right out of a book she’d read in junior high. It sounded so villainous, and it got Piper’s attention.

  “You wouldn’t,” Piper told her, his voice betraying his alarmed disbelief. He either knew he was right, or he was bluffing too.

  “We would.”

  They stood, frozen and staring at each other. When he wasn’t hunched or squatting, Piper stood incredibly tall. He dwarfed Gwen, and Rosemary hardly came up to his knee, even with all her fluffy hair. Still, the older girl matched his eyes. It was easier for her—she didn’t fully understand the stakes or the gravity of what she was threatening. Piper knew, Piper feared, and Piper took her unblinking resolve as truthful conviction.

  “Shit,” he muttered. Rosemary clapped her hands over her own mouth, as if hearing the inappropriate word somehow meant she would immediately be overcome with the compulsion to repeat it. Piper ignored her. He hung his head and stared at the pavement for a brief moment, then crooked his head to look at the girls. “You said you can pay? In what? Fairy dust?”

  “Gold,” Rosemary said. “Real, pure, pirate gold.”

  Piper groaned, knowing he had no option between the horrible
threat and fabulous reward. “Alright, we’ll discuss the issue,” he ceded. “But not here. I need a drink.”

  When he was not trying to appear sinister and strange, Piper walked with a proud, awkward stride. He remained stooped, his body somehow contorted in a way that made him look less conspicuously tall. He swung his legs forward and let his cape blow like a broken sail behind him. Gwen could keep up if she walked fast, but Rosemary had to prance, skip, and jog to keep pace.

  He cast a snide look down at Gwen, but didn’t slow. “I should have known you were one of Peter’s girls. How long have you been mothering him in Neverland?”

  “I’m nobody’s mother,” she objected, hating how she burned at the remark. “And it’s none of your business how long I’ve been there.”

  “Long enough to tangle with mermaids,” he muttered.

  “Where are we going?” Rosemary asked, her eyes scanning the street with novel delight. It was a profound and grown-up thing to be out in the city after dark.

  “Somewhere we can hide.”

  “We’re passing lots of good hiding places!”

  “No,” Piper answered. “We need somewhere with people.”

  They had cut out of the town center and down an adjacent street, almost as well lit as the courtyard, but equally deserted. Gwen kept her eyes open for dangerous-looking individuals, conscious that she had her kid sister in tow tonight. They passed only a few souls on the sidewalk, and none of them was as dangerous—in appearance or otherwise—as Piper.

  He took a sudden left, and Gwen scrambled to adjust. On the corner ahead, she saw the glow of neon signs and two men loitering outside of a door, smoking dwindling cigarettes. Piper homed in on it, compelling her to ask, “Where are we going?”

  “Somewhere I can get a drink.”

  Stating the obvious, Gwen tried to catch his eye and force him to acknowledge her with more than cursory answers and short remarks. “We can’t go to a bar. Rosemary and I are kids.”