Pay the Piper (2 page)

No, Callie hardly expected permission from her parents to go to a concert on her own, but a plan had begun to form that very moment. Callie was good with plans. With
her
parents, she had to be.

“I'll tell them I'm writing a story about the band for the school paper,” she told her friends. “Schoolwork trumps everything in their universe.”

“Phantasmagoric!” said Josee. “Supercal and all that.”

“Double,” Alison added.

A moment's worry hit Callie. “Do you think they'll go for it?”

“It'll work like a charm, like a magic spell, like…” Josee began.

“Clockwork,” Alison finished for her.

Callie smiled at them. They were not only her best friends, they were her cheering section. “Thanks.”

*   *   *

THAT AFTERNOON, WITH A NOTE
from her journalism teacher, and a number to call at the concert venue, Callie went home to put her plan into action.

Her parents had surprised her. Callie was still amazed at how easily they'd been convinced. It'd been a piece of cake. An enormous slice, actually.

“Brass Rat?” her dad had said, running fingers through his thinning blonde hair. He'd looked down at the flier Callie thrust at him. Dog-eared and messy with fingerprints, it had been downloaded off the Internet, then passed around at school to those few friends who didn't have e-mail. “I love them. We saw them back when Mars was an infant and…”

Yada, yada, yada,
Callie had thought, not listening.
In the good old rock-and-roll days. In the Cretaceous
. Of course she doubted that was possible. The band members were all young and hot. But she was careful not to say this aloud. Instead, fluttering her eyelids, she looked up at her dad with what passed for quiet adoration. “Then…” and let the question hang in the air.

He took the bait. “Maybe…”

That's when she'd set the hook deep. “The family never goes to things
together
anymore. Not since Mars went off to college.”

He'd turned. “Myrna,” he called to her mom. “Listen up. I've got a great idea.”

And then, just to totally embarrass Callie, he began to sing one of the early Brass Rat songs.

“Under the hill, under the stone,

No one can touch me, for I am alone,

No one can reach me, no one can dare,

No one can love me, and I do not care.”

“Harmony!” her mom shouted as she came into the room, her voice warbling about a half an octave above his.

Oh God, no!
Callie thought, her parents were fans! She was thankful her friends weren't around to hear them.

Except for the plan, Callie would have run out of the room, slamming the door behind her. But she stayed. Stayed and said with sweet conviction when they were finished, “Gee—I didn't know you knew Brass Rat that well.”

“We know that one song,” Mom said. “It was a number one back when Mars was a toddler. Got to hear them somewhere, I forget where. Didn't know they were still together. Dan—we have to go to the concert! The whole family.”

The whole family?
Callie's stomach flopped over. “But Mars is at school.”

“Well, we'll see if he wants to come home for the weekend,” her mother amended.

Her father shook his head. “Halloween's big at his school. Costume parties and…”

Breaking into song again, her mother sang the next two lines:

“I do not care, for I am a stone,

No one can touch me, for I am alone.”

Then she laughed. “What a sad-sack song that is. I wonder what his problem was.”

“No wifey, no kidlets.” Her father reached out a hand.

In a minute it was going to get seriously icky. Callie decided intervention was her only hope. “So who will come?”

They were holding hands now, but at least they'd stopped singing and talking baby talk. “Your mom, me, you—and Nick,” her father said.

In order to throw them off the scent, she said with a deep frown, “Does Nick have to come, too?” Though Nick would keep the two of them busy.

“If you want to go, Nick goes, too,” her dad said. “And you'll take him to the interview as well.”

That was
definitely
not part of her plan. This time her frown was real.

“Dad…” she wailed.

But there was to be no winning this argument. Callie left the room and slammed the door.

3 · Talent

A cold thin drizzle wormed its way down the window. The piper sighed. He could smoke his one cigarillo under the canopy, but it wouldn't be pleasant.

The trouble with habits,
he thought,
was not that they could kill you. It was that they could be boring for an eternity.
He turned up the collar of his pea coat and went out into the wet and the cold.

A family with two kids, a thin girl with orange ragweed hair about fourteen, a boy about seven with wide speedwell eyes, went past him, running into the warmth of the hall. So intent were they to get in out of the rain, they didn't recognize him.

Fame is fleeting,
his mother had always told him.
Family is forever.

“And alliteration is annoying,” he had replied once, lashing out and trying to hurt her feelings. He was brash and bitter then, as all young men are when they begin yearning to make their own mark on the world. And feel the bonds of their family like chains.

But his mother had merely patted his head and whispered in his ear, “You are my favorite, you know. So talented…”

The cigarillo suddenly tasted bitter and he spit three times and muttered a curse in the old tongue.

Talented,
he thought.
Not wise like my older brother, nor brave like my younger. But talented.

He ground the cigarillo out on his boot heel.

Time to go in and put that talent to work.

Time to sing for his supper.

Time to rock and roll.

4 · At the Concert

Nick tugged on Callie's press pass which hung around her neck in a plastic pocket. She'd been given it at the door. It had her name in big block letters and her school paper's name underneath,
The Hamper
.

Staring up at her with his little pointy chin lifted, Nick looked like a mini-clone of their father. “Callie, will they be coming out soon?”

They. The band.

Brass Rat.

She hummed a bit of their signature tune, the words running through her brain.

“Out of the darkness and into the light,

We search for a chance to get into the fight
.…”

She'd spent the last week listening to a couple of her parents' old CDs to soak up what her journalism teacher called
ambiance
. When she'd checked that word in the dictionary, she saw it meant “surroundings.” So she had surround-sounded herself with Brass Rat ambiance.

The group itself was about twenty years old, ancient in rock terms. But two of the four members were
much
older than she'd thought. Callie hadn't realized exactly how old until she'd done the research. After checking the printout included in the CDs, she'd gone on to read everything she could find about them on the Internet. Seems Gringras and Alabas had been in bands that had opened for everyone, including the Beatles, the Stones, Aerosmith, and Tina Turner.
Quite a history!

Given that Gringras and Alabas were apparently rock legends, Callie was stunned that they would come to the Valley and that she was actually at the concert. Along with about five thousand other people.

Minus one,
she thought. Her brother Mars. Boy, was he mad he was missing the show! But he was his fraternity's party czar, which meant that he was running their Halloween costume ball and couldn't get away.

Then she thought:
But
I
have a press pass
. That meant she could get up close and personal with the band. Other kids from other schools might have such passes, but Callie knew she was the only reporter from her school who'd wangled one. Probably because she was the only one in journalism class who could actually write. The others were still at the
what's-a-gerund?
stage of grammar.

Nick grabbed her press pass again, being annoying as usual. “When are they gonna get here?” he asked, in his been-in-the-car-too-long whine.

“Any minute, Bugbrain,” she told him, then glanced over at her mother and father who were studiously ignoring the insult. Or else they hadn't heard it. She guessed the latter as they were absolutely wrapped up watching two men dressed all in black who were checking out the instruments onstage.

Suddenly the lights went down.

The crowd began screaming and it was deafening.

Nick grabbed Callie's hand. His palm was icy. “Is it time?”

She was so excited, she didn't let go and instead gave his hand a sisterly squeeze. “Time.”

The sold-out hall was dark and loud and, after a minute, she was glad she hadn't let go.

“What's happening?” Nick said. He couldn't see over all the standing, screaming fans.

On tiptoe, Callie tried to make out anything on the stage. The men in black had gone. “Nothing yet.” She could feel the tension rising all around her.

A few minutes more, and still Brass Rat hadn't taken the stage. Now there were some catcalls, some scattered murmurings as the crowd began to get restless.

By her side, Nick was turning his head, like the girl in the
Exorcist
movie. Then he dropped her hand and spun around on one leg.

“Nick…” she whispered angrily, wondering at the same time if the show was ever going to start.

Then she realized—it already had. A low sound was building,
and it probably had been for some time
. Only now was the sound becoming audible—a note built from the bottom up, finally resolving into a deep, throbbing tone.

Callie glanced behind them, searching for the source of the sound in the blackened hall, then looked again at the stage. Her eyes had already become accustomed to the darkness, and now she could see things—a bit of movement, a stool, a mike and … there!

A small blue spotlight suddenly outlined a lone figure at center stage. He was dressed in what looked like peasant's apparel: a simple cotton shirt, homespun breeches, sturdy leather riding boots.
Unusually tall and thin, but not unattractively so,
she thought. In fact, he looked awfully good for a guy who had to be at least her father's age. Not all wrinkly like Mick Jagger or Paul McCartney.

Yep,
she thought,
Peter Gringras is still a hottie, no matter how old he might be
.

Gringras stood in front of the microphone with sinuous fingers wrapped around a silver flute. He appeared to be squeezing that one amazing note out of the instrument. Callie wondered when he would ever take another breath. He began to rock slightly, back and forth, and his clothes—that had first seemed so plain—came alive as if something woven into them caught the light and danced.

He had yet to play a second note and Callie could see that he already owned the crowd. Glancing around—the hall now lit with a warm glow—she made out people swaying to the same rhythm. There was no beat, no meter, just this one long note, yet everyone in the hall seemed to hear the hint of a song, a dance, a celebration.

Gringras began to define it.

What started as one note became two.

Then four.

Then, as the pace and pulses quickened, the notes came too quick to count. Gringras gyrated madly and his fingers flew across the pads.

The crowd roared as he flipped the flute to the other side and played left-handed. Callie remembered Mrs. Ryder, her fifth grade music teacher, telling her that such a thing was impossible. Yet, there he was, playing left-handed—
sinisterly,
thought Callie, recalling the old word for left—with no discernible drop in skill.

The pitch grew higher and the notes came faster, higher and faster, faster and higher, and Gringras was screaming the notes as he played them until Callie could no longer tell what was voice and what was flute or if it was something else entirely.

Then she knew: At the end, it was his voice. She knew because, as he screamed the final impossibly high note, he threw his flute into the air. The spotlight left him and followed the flute arcing up toward the ceiling. When it reached its apex the last note stopped and the spotlight went out, plunging the hall back into darkness.

The stage exploded.

Three columns of flame shot straight up from the front of the stage and Brass Rat was there.

The electric guitar raged and drums pounded and the band kicked into one of their newer songs, “Pay the Piper” with its opening line: “So you say you wanna dance all night…”

5 · Ratter

Callie stood absolutely still watching the band, almost as if under an enchantment. Gringras' good looks—the high cheekbones, the thin nose, the brilliant green of his eyes—were mesmerizing. How could she have thought he was older than her father? He was simply beautiful, and he moved beautifully, too, like some great jungle cat, all oiled motion, flowing.

The drummer, Johnny Alabas, had some of that same beauty, but slightly tarnished. Everything about him was too sharp, too long, too white, as if he were a funhouse mirror reflection of the piper.

Bass player Tommy Nickels was small, compact, and dark.

But it was the guitarist, Scott Morrison, who held Callie in thrall, with his long blonde hair tied back in a braid, his wide Viking face set with faded blue eyes. If Gringras was a cat, Scott was a horse. A stallion. Big and powerful and gorgeous. He was wearing black leather trousers with rats painted around the bottom of the legs, their tails twining up like strange vines. And a black tee with Celtic knotwork printed on front and back.