“The rest is for you to do,” he said without turning. “I go to prepare myself. Tonight I cure your children. Tomorrow I collect my price.”
Into the dying light the stranger disappeared.
The lots were cast. It was the son of the Lord Mayor that was chosen.
* * *
That night, the people of Old’ham huddled behind closed doors, clutching their sick children close, praying that the oath they had taken would yield fruit.
It began sometime after midnight. A single sound shattered the perfect stillness of that evening. Some said they heard a child’s cry. Others, the shriek of a bird. Still more, the moan of the dying. And others, the wail of an injured beast.
But whatever they heard at first, all agreed about what followed—the sound of piping.
Discordant, yet melodic. Soothing, yet daemonic. A single flute, the music of which did not bring joy. Rather, it seemed to bore into the minds of those who heard it, to steal their happiness and replace it with pain, taking some of their very sanity with it.
And yet as the sound passed, so too did the suffering. In its place came joy, for as the pipe played, the children were healed, one by one. By the time the last note died away, the town had been restored.
The people poured into the streets. They sang, and they danced, and they drank wine. Many things were done beneath the moon that I will not speak of here. But the sun rose, as it must on every night. And when it did, it rose on a day of reckoning.
The stranger came forth. He walked down streets that still echoed with the revelry of the night before. He met no one on his way to the church to collect his prize. He strode up the steps and pushed open the doors.
It was deserted, or at least, that’s how it appeared. In an instant, a half-dozen men surrounded him, their swords drawn. The Lord Mayor stepped from behind a pillar, his countenance that of a man who has played another for a fool. But to the Lord Mayor’s annoyance, the fool still did not seem to comprehend that he had been played.
“Did you bring the boy?” the stranger asked.
The men chuckled, secure behind the points of their blades.
“Why no, my friend,” said the Lord Mayor. “No, I think a new deal is in order. You get to keep your life, and all debts are paid.”
“So you mean to break the bargain, then?”
The Lord Mayor took a step forward, drawing his own sword. “Did you not hear me? Your payment is your life. Oh, you had the others fooled, with your trickery and your black magic. But we know how to deal with witches in this town, especially the ones that poison the well and then claim to have the cure. You turn and you go, and if we ever hear of the like of you in these parts again, I will personally ride out and have your head.”
The stranger took a step back and into the morning sun. “By your own word, then.”
There was a flash of light and smoke, and when the swordsmen opened their eyes again, the stranger was gone.
What came that night became the stuff of legend.
Darkness fell hard and fast, and there were few who thought that it did not come several hours before its appointed time. The moon, a full half the evening before, never rose that night. Ebon night held sway, and silence joined it, the kind that breaks men’s minds. But what followed made those who heard it wish that the maddening silence had never been shattered.
It was the sound of piping. But not one pipe. Nay, it was thousands. Drums had joined it. Deep, throbbing drums that pounded into the mind and chased away all thought. A dry wind began to blow, to whip through the streets and rap upon the doors. A chorus of screams was added to the cacophony. Those howls of pain were no illusion, however; they were very much of this earth.
Hell had come to Old’ham, the Devil seeking his due.
In his home in the forests, the woodsman heard all. His family huddled in fear, but he took up his sword. They begged him not to go, but when the woodsman looked to the mark upon his hand, he knew that he had a duty to stop whatever the townspeople had so foolishly started. He rushed into the darkness to the fate that awaited him.
By the time he reached the church, the roar of satanic song and the pitiful cries of the dying and those who wished they were dead had become an almost solid wall of sound. But when he turned the corner and ran into the High Street, it was then that his sanity almost slipped.
A great beast filled the city street. Or at least, that is how he perceived it. One moment, it was a monster, unlike anything he had ever seen before, with whip-like arms that buzzed and slapped against the earth in great thunderous strikes. Then it was a column of smoke and fire that roared and burned and spat out noxious fumes. Then it was a dragon, a great black dragon with the arms and wings of a bat. Then it was a swirling vortex of wind and dust that ripped apart all in its path. But whatever form it took, the piping never ceased, nor did the beating of the drums.
As he watched, the form, whatever form it was at the moment, continued its slow march toward him. A door would swing open or a wall would be torn down, the inhabitants therein vomited out into the streets screaming and gibbering and clawing at the ground. Before him they were sliced in half by a crashing, caber-like arm; snapped up by the jaws of an enormous maw, ripped apart by a whirlwind, or turned to ash by toxic vapors. The end was always the same; they all died. All of them—men, women, and children.
The woodsman dropped his sword. He stepped forward. “You want a sacrifice!” he screamed. “Take me.”
The swirling chaos before him halted. Then it seemed to part, and out stepped the stranger. His amber cloak billowed like smoke, and in his hand he held a small flute.
“Woodsman, you would offer yourself as a sacrifice?”
The woodsman hesitated but for a moment. He closed his eyes and uttered a prayer to God—both the one that he worshiped, and those to whom his ancestors bowed before beyond the veil.
“Yes,” he said. “I am ready.”
There was a rumble that shook the earth. It came from the stranger. He was laughing. “Do you not see?” he said, sweeping his arm behind him as if to encompass the entire town. “Do you still not understand? What is the sacrifice of one, when I can have hundreds? You offer yourself now. But these, they offered themselves before. They swore the oath that you rejected. A blood bond, to make full the debt they owed if it were not paid—with interest accrued.”
“But I am bound as well,” the woodsman said, almost begging. “Take me instead.”
“What does your life mean to me? I have lived a thousand of your lifetimes. Do you think I care for you, or this accursed place? Their blood gives me power, and one day, when it runs like rivers, when the power is enough, then I will use it to change the very course of the stars in the sky. And when they are right, all will bow before their true masters.”
The woodsman looked down to the sword that still lay in the dust. The stranger began to laugh again.
“You are a fool. But I must say, bravery such as this I have rarely seen from your kind. Go back to your family. Tell them you love them. And then send them away, your wife and your child. This I give to you, but you must give me something in return. I will come for you. When I finish here.”
Then he turned and stepped back into the storm.
The woodsman ran home. He hugged his wife and child tight, and then he told them to run, to flee to the next town and then the one beyond that and not to stop until they reached a place where no one had ever heard of Old Bethlehem. They did not protest. They knew that death was on their doorstep. They knew that this was their only chance. I hope that wherever they fled, they lived out their lives in peace and joy.
The stranger came to the house of the woodsman. The roof did not fly away. The wall did not collapse. Instead, there was merely a knock on the door.
The woodsman opened it.
The stranger stood before him.
“To you,” he said, “I grant my pardon, be it on one condition. Here you will stay, and you
will spread to all those who pass by my story. You will tell them what came to be in this town, so that all may fear the name of Nyarlathotep, the Piper in Yellow!”
* * *
You see, my friend, I am the man who spoke with death that day, all those centuries ago. And this mark upon my hand is the sigil of my mission—and my curse.
You seem confused? Oh, you’ve never heard of the story of the piper? Well, I suppose the details change in the retelling, and there are many who stray within these borders and then go on to their homes or to far horizons who no doubt soften the edges, for the sake perhaps of their own sanity.
And of course, there’s the name of the town itself. For I told you that, whatever its fathers may have wished, Bethlehem never really stuck. So it bears many names, in tales and in song. But there is one that is most prominent. One that seems to fit Lil’ham more than most. A strange thing really, for it is not only a corruption but an inversion.
Most people have never heard of Bethlehem or New Bedlam or Lil’ham.
No, in the story that gets retold the most, the story that most people have heard, the town went by another name—
Hamelin.
THE WORM THAT CONQUERS
Letters from Lieutenant François le Villard to Mademoiselle Marguerite Deraismes (Translated), February 18 – March 21, 1916
My dearest Marguerite,
How I wish that I could see you again, if even for a moment. I know you are with me always, and when I close my eyes, it is your face I see. Sometimes I think that I catch a glimpse of you, walking amongst the fog and iridescent mist beyond the trenches, as if your spirit has traveled from Étretat to be with me as you sleep safely in your bed. But then the cannon fires and the earth quakes and my reverie is chased away.
The battlefield is no place for a dreamer.
There are those who would tell me that I should not so freely share with you the things that I have seen, the things that I have feared, the deaths I have almost died and may yet face. With the deepest respect, they are fools.
I know you worry for me. I know that it eats you away inside. Is it better to lie to you, to deny to you the truth? You have seen the death notices in the papers. You are no fool. And that is why I love you. So until that day comes when you tell me you wish not to hear of the things I see, I shall deliver them to you.
As clearly and truthfully as I can.
* * *
When I dream, I do not dream of war. I do not hear the cannonade. I do not see the arcs of fire. I do not feel their heat. Their crash does not shake me. I do not know where I go, precisely. Only that I am away. That I am absent. Without leave. Where there is no muck and mire. Where blood and stagnant water do not mix and mingle. Where the mud does not flow like a narrow sea, where death does not guard the shore.
That is my dream. Life is my nightmare.
* * *
There are rumors circulating among the men. I hear them, even though they speak only in hushed tones which drop to silence when I am nearby. There are times I wish I was an enlisted man. Soldiers may follow a lieutenant into fire and death, but they will never truly trust him. Still, I hear what I am not meant to.
They say that the Germans know they cannot win, that these endless lines of torn earth will never break. One might mistake this lack of confidence as a positive development, but such rumors seldom are. The men whisper of a new plan, to bleed us white. To deal death in such numbers that our will to fight is broken, even if our lines still hold. And they say that is why we have been sent here, to this place called Verdun.
To be bled.
* * *
The rain came down in torrents. The fog that rose up from the bog that lies between the lines was so thick that if the Germans had marched a division across the mud-sea we would not have known it until they were driving bayonets into our chests. But nothing moves out there. Nothing marches in the howling wind. Still, we wait and we stand guard. The rain pouring, soaking uniforms and men’s souls. The water pools at our feet, eating away at them. Rotting them from the inside, while the rats are forced from their holes, scurrying along the edge of the parapets, grown fat and slow from the flesh of the dead.
My eyes have become accustomed to the darkness. To move in daylight is to invite death, and we have become creatures of the night. The pacifists and the philosophers say that war turns men into animals. They are wrong. War makes monsters of us all.
* * *
The Germans hold the high ground. Our aerial reconnaissance reports that they have placed artillery upon those heights. From there they will rain down fire upon us. And we will try to take those hills to stop them. Against that insignificant mound, the flower of France shall dash itself until we wash it away in our blood.
* * *
They came for us at midnight, rising up out of the mist, fire like dragons’ eyes. We had been expecting them, and yet we were not ready for our expectations to turn to that horror.
Every evening we had waited, eyes peering into the shrouded night, wondering much, seeing little. I had command of a three-man Hotchkiss crew, and all of us peered over the barrels of our machine guns, certain that what the mud slowed and the barbed wire stopped, we could kill.
That was the plan from command, at least. Let the Germans come. Let them weaken themselves. And then we would counter, break their lines, take the hill.
I wonder how many such flights of military fancy were formed in the bowels of command bunkers along the front. How often generals and colonels pushed imaginary units across imaginary lines to imaginary goals with a sureness that the real men they represented would somehow turn that fancy into fact. Would turn chalk symbols on a blackboard into gains on the ground. Would turn a pin pushed into a map into the end of the war.
The Germans had maps, too. And they were just as careless.
So we waited. Some might think that the waiting would dull the senses, that day after day and night after night of anticipation would lead to complacency. Not so, not there, not in the trenches. Every night our nerves bristled, electric with the coming fight. We stared out over that endless dead plain and longed for daylight.
Tonight, though, should have been safe. The rains had fallen all day, and we doubted, in our hearts if not in spoken words, that the enemy would come. The fog was thick upon the field of battle. Nothing moved there in the swirling mists, at least, nothing we saw.
But they were there. Creeping along. Crawling, when they should have walked. Beneath the death-shroud gray fog.
They rose as one.
At first, we did not see them. We had stared so long into the darkness that our eyes were masked, as if covered in scales. Then we saw the light, and the scales fell away.
I’ll never know, of course, what the others saw in that moment. No doubt that vision was for each man’s eyes alone. All I know is this—in an instant, No Man’s Land erupted in fire.
There were several hundred of them, perhaps a thousand feet from the parapet, spread down the line as far as the eye could see in either direction. They stood like Prometheus, each with one arm above his head, fire in his hand. Or that is how I saw them, at least, as gods come to earth, to illuminate the night and cleanse the battlefield of the muck and the filth with which we had covered it.
Every man in the trenches stood dumbstruck by what we witnessed. But it was no angel, no god, no deliverer. It was death.
“You fools!” I shouted, as much at my own stupidity as at my men. “Kill them!”
But it was too late. From the hills above, German artillerymen had zeroed in their guns. The flares the soldiers held above their heads gave them the ultimate marker. I didn’t even get off a shot before the first shell fell. Instead, I grabbed my machine gunner and threw him to the ground.
The first shell exploded a hundred yards down the trench. Close enough that I saw men torn to pieces, close enough that I could hear the screams of the dying. But not so close as to put us in danger. That would com
e later. The first shell was the last one I really saw. There were too many that followed too quickly.
They crashed down like bolts from the thunder god, ripping apart our lines, bursting eardrums, shattering bone, shredding skin. A man cannot think in a moment of horror like that, and in my mind’s eye I saw a kaleidoscope of images, flashes of my past, both familiar and unfamiliar days. A field behind my family’s home on a summer eve. A girl at the Exposition Universelle, a flower in her hair. The sun half-obscured by clouds. A wooden stick, swirling in a whirlpool. Around and around and around. But never down. You, on the night of our wedding, your skin glistening in the moonlight, the half-smile on your face.
Thunder was our world, and in the maelstrom men screamed. Some called to their God, to their mothers, while others shouted words in tongues primeval, left-over languages long forgotten.
How long did the shells fall? Was it minutes? Hours? Perhaps days, for if the sun had risen and fallen in that mind-shattering span I would not have known it, nor felt its warmth upon my face. You will never know, thank God, what it feels like to believe that every second could be your last and to expect that the next one will be.
But I did not die, and like a storm that rolls across the plain and into someone else’s future, the thunder ceased. Of the men who lived, some cowered in the trenches, unwilling to believe that it had really ended. Others pulled themselves up, their eyes void of all understanding. But most started to celebrate. They had survived, and their cries of joy might have reached all the way to Heaven.
Fools.
I grabbed my gunner up from the pit in which he lay. He shook in my hands, and I am ashamed to say that I struck him across the mouth to calm him. I could think of no other way, and that act of violence brought him back. “Man your weapon,” I said. Then I blew the whistle hanging from my neck. Even in their reveries, to that unmistakable signal they responded. Many turned to me, so conditioned were they to answer to that sound.
The Fiddle is the Devils Instrument Page 12
