The Piper's Price

by Audrey Greathouse

  “Who?”

  “Rosemary! My sister!” she said, pointing back at the gleeful girl.

  “Don’t fuss. Just stay quiet, the both of you.”

  Piper approached the doorway, and the two men, snickering at a shared joke, took objection.

  “Whoa, hey.” The bald man crushed the remainder of his cigarette under his foot and put up a hand to stop him. The other continued smoking. Gwen stared at the flashing LED lights that illuminated drink specials on a black whiteboard. The Dirty Girl Scout and Mexican Midget cocktails listed did not make the bar seem any more appealing than the smell of smoke at the door.

  “What?” Piper asked.

  “You can’t come in here with your kids. Twenty-one and up!”

  “I’ll catch you later, Mike,” the other man said. His friend waved him away, focused on Piper.

  “Kids? What kids?” Piper asked.

  The conviction left the man’s eyes as soon as he looked back to Gwen and Rosemary. An odd confusion began to fill his eyes. Still staring, he opened his mouth to speak, but Piper cut him off and forced him to look him in the eye.

  “Didn’t your mother ever teach you any better than to stare? Now will you let me and my aunts in? It’s my great-aunt’s birthday today, and we’re here for a drink.” Piper held his gaze, forgoing any blinking as he spoke. “For eighty-two years, she’s always had a gin and tonic on her birthday, is that too much to ask?”

  “Is that too much to ask…?” the man echoed. “No, no… but…” He looked at Rosemary. “This is your great-aunt?”

  “Yes,” Piper insisted. He said it with such natural conviction that Gwen felt shaken in her understanding of reality.

  “How old is she?”

  “Don’t you know it’s impolite to ask a woman’s age?” Piper demanded. The disoriented bouncer hastily apologized before Piper continued, “But if you must know, she’s a hundred and two today. She’s all shriveled up and shrunk, but she’s a good woman.”

  Everyone stared at Rosemary, who took the opportunity to do her best croaky, old lady voice and tell the bouncer, “Hello there, sonny!”

  He seemed thoroughly convinced. He gave Gwen one last look. “And you are?”

  Piper didn’t give her a chance to answer for herself. “My other aunt, who hasn’t shrunk nearly as much with age, but is still as grey and wrinkled as any old lady you’ve ever laid eyes on. They’re very tired, and all this standing around isn’t good for their knees. Now you will take us inside and show us to a quiet table.”

  There was a moment’s pause in which Gwen questioned the sheer lunacy of what was happening. Then Piper snapped his fingers, and the bouncer became enthusiastically agreeable. “Of course. We’ve got a table in the back. It shouldn’t be too noisy.”

  “Whippersnapper!” Rosemary shouted at him.

  He laughed it off as the antics of a senile old woman. “Right this way, ma’am.”

  Heads turned as the three of them entered the bar with the bouncer. Piper in his baggy and colorfully patched clothes was almost more out of place than the two little girls. They were in the company of the bouncer though, so the patrons dismissed the event. Rosemary ogled the bar, but Gwen tried to keep her eyes away from everyone else’s. She didn’t want to give them away with a guilty look, although that was probably impossible given Piper’s profound hypnotic ability.

  Towering booths lined the brick walls, their glossy maroon fabric reflecting yellow light from the hanging lamps in diffused blotches. The bartender wore a button-up shirt and slacks, but everyone else seemed to be wearing at least one denim garment.

  The room was subdivided by a wall of booths, and the bouncer led them to a table on the other side where they would be out of sight of the other patrons, but not the bartender. All the furniture in the room was made of a wood so dark it looked black. There was no polish or shine to it. As they took a seat at a round table with square-backed chairs, Gwen cast a glance at the bar—a great black juggernaut, behind which rested a library of liquors. The bartender gave them a nasty look, which only intensified as they settled at their table.

  “Happy birthday,” the bouncer told Rosemary, as the bartender stormed over.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” he fumed.

  “Don’t worry,” the bouncer said, pulling out another cigarette and heading back out to smoke it. “It’s the old girl’s birthday.”

  “What about the little one!”

  But the bouncer was already beyond reach, oblivious to his coworker’s concerns.

  Confused and frustrated, the bartender told Piper, “I’m going to have to ask you and your children to leave. There are laws against minors in bars.” He made the mistake of looking him in the eye though.

  “No, there aren’t,” Piper replied, holding his gaze. “You will be happy to serve us.”

  The tension dissolved out of the bartender’s shoulders and brow. His body relaxed as if his split-second progression from angry to confounded was a natural motion. “I’d be happy to…?” He was begging for some kind of direction or confirmation, lost in the mind Piper had so effectively clouded.

  “Serve us,” Piper asserted. “These two old ladies and I are here to celebrate her hundred-and-second birthday.”

  “A hundred and two?” He still bore a skeptical expression as he turned to look at Rosemary.

  “I’m an old lady!” the eight-year-old declared, amused.

  Piper waved his hand with a sharp gesture that brought the bartender’s eyes back to his. “She is your best customer, and you will give us drinks tonight, free of charge, to celebrate her birthday.”

  The bartender was quiet. Still staring into Piper’s eyes, he was unable to object but in too much of a daze to react. Piper snapped his fingers, and the bartender lapsed back into his—now adjusted—reality.

  “Drinks are on the house tonight,” he announced, as if it were his own happy idea. “What can I get for you?”

  “A Pilsner—or whatever pale lager you have.”

  “And what for the birthday girl?”

  Rosemary’s eyes grew wide like a flower opening up in the sunlight. “Can I have a Shirley Temple?”

  “Sure thing.” He turned to Gwen. “And you, ma’am?”

  “I’m fine,” she answered, her mouth barely moving with the taciturn response.

  “Can I get extra cherries?” Rosemary asked, aware that she had an enchanted adult in her power and wanting to capitalize on this glorious event to the best of her ability. “Like, five?” She held up her hand with all five fingers to illustrate.

  The bartender laughed. “Are you going to want a shot in that or anything?”

  Bounding back into character as a hundred-and-two-year-old woman, Rosemary croaked, “No thank you, sonny. My gallbladder isn’t what it used to be.”

  The bartender left and Piper took the guilder out from a pocket on his waistcoat. Gwen hadn’t even seen the pocket amid the patches. It looked like an obsessive collection, visible now that he was sitting still in the light, his cape brushed back. There were patches for places, bands, brands, sports teams, a yellow smiley, a green alien, a Coca-Cola logo, an ACDC thunderbolt, the Batman symbol, an Australian flag… and affixed somewhere, Gwen assumed, was a varsity jacket patch for Princeton University’s fencing team.

  Piper flicked the coin and snatched it out of the air with an animal’s reflexes. He darted his eyes to Gwen, and it planted a healthy fear of him in her heart. She didn’t doubt he could manipulate her as easily as he had the bar employees. “So what’s the proposition? You want to talk about it? Talk.”

  She felt more comfortable looking at him when he wasn’t talking. That would be her strategy for this conversation—only meet his eyes when she was the one speaking.

  “Peter wants to recruit more children. Neverland is seeing more attacks than it has in years, from Molotov newsprint to drone invasions, and—”

  “Where do I figure in these desires of the brat?”

  �
��Mass recruitment,” Gwen answered. “We need a way in which to communicate with the children that will go undetected by ordinary adults.”

  He rocked back in his chair as she spoke, and then let it fall forward onto its legs. As he opened his mouth, Gwen averted her eyes. “And what about the un-ordinary adults? I’ve heard this pitch before, mäuschen, and it landed me in prison for nearly three years. Why should I think this time will be any different?”

  Rosemary watched him eagerly, waiting for him to stop speaking so she could start. Gwen had begun this conversation, but with no idea where it would go. She gave Rosemary the reins, and sat back as she realized how little she knew about Peter’s plans, and how passionately her sister had invested herself in them.

  “We’ll be prepared. We want to do it at night, when the ordinary grown-ups won’t wake up. When the officers arrive, we’ll be ready to fight.”

  “We?” Piper’s dissatisfaction was pooling on his face. He was a clogged emotional drain, and all his negativity just spilled back out. He looked like a man who had done prison time under surreal and magical circumstances.

  “Us kids,” Rosemary told him. “The rest of us will be there to defend and get as many of the other kids as possible. We just need you to wake everyone up with your pipe. At the first sign of the anti-magic people, you can leave the rest to us.”

  This plan of action put him in a moderately more conformable disposition. The bartender returned with his beer, frothy and golden in a tall, bulbous glass. He set it down in front of Piper, and then placed the Shirley Temple in front of Rosemary, who was all but jumping out of her seat in excitement for the elegant sugar water. The cocktail glass looked ridiculous with five waxy maraschino cherries floating in it.

  Once the barkeeper was out of earshot and Piper had downed half of his beer, he wiped the foam from his prickly mustache. “What’s in it for me?”

  “Pirate gold,” Rosemary repeated, slurping a cherry out of her soda and chewing it as she talked. “A whole chest of it, if you want!”

  He seemed unimpressed with the idea of a trunk full of the greatest relics and riches of mortal men’s dreams. “That won’t do. Not now.”

  “What do you mean?” Gwen asked, offended by his pretension. “What do you even need with money, anyway, when you can just hypnotize people to give you your things? There’s nothing in Neverland that would have more value in the real world.”

  “Ah, but there is,” Piper told her, nursing the rest of his golden beer. “Hypnosis only works in person, and I don’t like people. A trunk full of ancient coins… it would take time to track down the sort of person interested in the full value of those old pieces. They’ll be imbued with magic for as long as they’ve spent in Neverland, and melting them down for the gold would unleash that magic in a way that would be traceable, if not dangerous.”

  The hum of other patrons’ conversations was drowned out by the fog of intensity forming around their table. “Then what do you want?”

  Piper had his answer. “First of all, I want the crown of Princess Charlotte of Wales. That I can easily get to an interested party for a great sum of modern money. It was Blood Bone Eddie’s greatest steal, and I know it never left Neverland. Secondly, I want a root cutting from the Never Tree.”

  “What do you want with that?” Gwen didn’t dare ask what the Never Tree was, for fear of sounding like an idiot when she desperately needed to appear like a knowledgeable negotiator. She remembered seeing it in her father’s paper, but she knew little about it.

  Piper seemed to sense her ignorance and replied condescendingly, “The same thing Neverland wants with it. I don’t want to be found.”

  “And the riddles, music, and rats aren’t doing that well enough for you?”

  Piper leaned just an inch closer, and even that motion made Gwen uncomfortable. “No—as you yourself pointed out, the mermaids and the ramifications of their magic can still find me. They collude with the stars, and they can always find me. I want to be finished with them, and I won’t until I have something more powerful than them.”

  “If it’s in Neverland, Peter can get it.” Rosemary sipped her soda, holding her cocktail glass with both hands.

  “Good. There’s just one more thing then.”

  It sounded exorbitant to Gwen, but it was just what she’d been warned to expect from Piper. “You want another thing, too?” Gwen asked. “That’s convenient. So do we.”

  His smug satisfaction dripped away; he couldn’t know if he still had the upper hand when this older girl continued to reveal new information. “What else could you possibly want from me?”

  Rosemary grew sober, which added to Piper’s discomfort. The two girls exchanged a glance before Rosemary told him, “We need to know where they took you when you got arrested.”

  His beady eyes shrank into dissatisfied slits in his face again. “Why do you need to know that?”

  Gwen swallowed her unease and spoke with all the confidence she could muster. “A fairy was captured in Neverland this week. We need to find her. They must have her in a prison or laboratory of some kind, and we suspect it would be wherever you were held.”

  Piper laughed, which was an unsettling experience. “A fairy? Girl, do you have any idea what forces you are up against? No matter—this will serve both our ends.”

  “How so?”

  “You want me to pipe the children to Neverland? Then there’s one thing I’ll need in addition to my payment—my pipe.”

  “Your—what? Don’t you have a pipe?”

  He shook his head, with a vindictive pleasure in his own misfortune since he knew it would be remedied by others’ effort. “They took it. When I managed to mesmerize one of the guards, I didn’t have a chance to break it out, too.”

  “I thought the song was magic, that you were magic… Why can’t you make use of a different pipe?”

  Rosemary chugged her soda, enthralled with this discussion, and then picked cherries out from amid ice cubes in her glass, one at a time.

  “Go ask the mermaids that one,” he scoffed. More somber, he added, “Never trust a mermaid.” He gulped down the last of his lager. Nothing but a frothy residue was left in the glass.

  Gwen took a deep breath and fidgeted with her hands, under the table and out of sight. “Okay. So if you tell us where the facility is, we can make a plan to rescue Hollyhock and get your pipe back. Peter will get you the crown and the Never Tree root, then you’ll be on board?”

  “Yes—providing I’m paid up front.”

  “Alright then. It’s a deal.”

  “Shake on it,” Piper demanded, standing up and extending his hand.

  “Pardon?”

  “Shake on it. It’s a deal, isn’t it?”

  “Oh, well, yes. Of course.” Gwen got to her feet, but there was a level of commitment signified in a handshake that put her at ill at ease. Why couldn’t Peter be here, with his boundless confidence? Why would he send such a nervous emissary? She tried not to think about how unqualified she was—chronologically and philosophically—to be working as the right-hand woman of Peter Pan. She gave him her hand, but his hand was as rigid as his grip. They did not shake.

  “What is your name?” Again, he caught her of guard, she stammered, and he repeated, “What is your name, girl?”

  “Gwen. Gwendolyn.”

  “Alright, Miss Gwendolyn. If you can look me in the eye and shake on this, we’ve got a deal. I’ll pipe a small army to Peter.”

  She hesitated. What did looking him in the eye have to do with it? Swallowing her fear and bracing her mind against whatever might come, she stared up at him—so tall, even when he hunched over. She jerked her hand up and down in a stilted handshake that became more fluid only as she realized nothing was going horribly wrong.

  “Good,” he declared. “This arrangement will be advantageous to all—except for the Anomalous Activity Assholes. What could be better?”

  He searched several hidden pockets in his waistcoat until he found a
pen. On the back of a drink coaster, he began scribbling instructions. “This will give you everything you need to find my pipe, and presumably your little winged friend as well.”

  She took a deep breath and flashed a quick smile at Rosemary while Piper was busy writing. This was working. She wanted to take just a second to revel in that success before she powered through the last minutes of this stressful interaction. One last pertinent thought occurred to her. “How will we find you once we have the pipe and your payment?”

  Piper finished scrawling his instructions and shoved the coaster into Gwen’s hands. He stroked his slender beard once, and then looked around the bar. “Outside. We’ll find a messenger outside.”

  Rosemary spit a cherry stem back into her glass, and Gwen tucked the coaster into her satchel. Piper’s swift pace carried them out of the bar almost before the bartender could call out one last, “Happy birthday,” to Rosemary, his favorite hundred-and-two-year-old customer.

  “Whippersnapper!” Rosemary yelled back. Gwen grabbed her arm and lovingly tugged her out the door.

  Outside, Piper began whistling. He strolled now, back in the direction they’d come from. The girls recognized the tune he was whistling, and the enchanted melody carried far into the urban night.

  A rat poked out of a dumpster between a teriyaki shop and nail salon, squealing in recognition. With the grace of a snake, it slid out of the dumpster and obediently ran to Piper. He put out his hand and let it bound onto his palm. He stopped whistling only when he had raised the rat to his face and was eye to eye with the rodent. “Go with this girl. Stay by her side. When she tells you to come for me, come.”

  Gwen thought she saw it nod.

  He waited a moment, never blinking, and then snapped the fingers of his other hand. The rat squealed again, bouncing frantically in his hands. Piper held it out for Gwen and dropped it down to her. She scrambled to catch it in her hands, rather than have it land on her. It was impulsive to stop something from falling on her, but she was disgusted as soon as she realized she was holding a rat they’d just found in the dumpster. Fortunately, the creature was calm in her hands and nuzzled her thumb. It was almost cute, now that Piper had tamed it for her.