Pay the Piper (6 page)

“Blood guilt,” said Josee just as Callie said, “Teind.”

“Oh, I know that one!” Alison said.

“Which one?” they asked together.

“
Teind.
It's in a song Daddy sings.” Her father was a folksinger, only modestly successful, or so Callie's parents said, meaning he was known best in Western Massachusetts and played at bars and clubs around the area. Alison quoted him all the time. “A real dote-head instead of a daughter,” is what Josee called her, out of Alison's hearing. But then Alison didn't have a mother, so Callie always cut her a lot of slack.

“What song?

“It's called ‘Tam Lin.'” Alison began to sing in a quavery voice:

“All pleasant is the fairy land

For those that in it dwell,

But at the end of seven years

They pay a teind to hell;

And I'm so fair and full of flesh,

I'm feared twill be mysel'.”

Callie's heart seemed to stutter.
Seven years!
That was exactly what Scott had said.
This thing is sounding more and more like one of Granny's stories, with magic and elves and …

“But what about blood guilt?” Josee was asking. “Sounds extremely yucky, not to mention unsanitary, unappetizing, unappealing, and certainly unsafe.”

“Dunno anything about that,” Alison said. “What do you think?”

“I'd feel guilty about spilling blood, I guess. Not to mention grossed out, finger-down-the-throat gagged, and totally incapacitated with the mewling poos!”

They kept nattering on, but Callie barely heard them. Her mind was suddenly filled with questions: What had she stumbled into? Was it the Mafia? Or gang payments? Or a drug cartel? Or … Suddenly she remembered the rats dancing.

“Rats!” she said aloud.

Just then a bell rang.

School had started and her friends had been hardly any help at all.

*   *   *

CALLIE HAD TROUBLE CONCENTRATING IN
algebra. The logarithms she'd understood only the week before now made no sense. In her Earth Science class, she kept confusing the Jurassic with the Mesozoic, much to her teacher's annoyance. And in her English class—usually her best subject—she was well behind the class reading of
A Day No Pigs Would Die,
which she thought was a stupid book anyway. When she said so aloud, V. Louise looked daggers at her and she could feel her grade sinking with each word.

In fact, the entire day, all she could think about was the band and the odd things Alabas had been saying to Scott. Visions of the dancing rats kept coming back to her. Each time she saw Alison and Josee, they asked her questions about the “blood guilt” which she couldn't answer.

“Maybe it's blood
gilt,
” Josee said at lunch, “like gilding the lily, adding gold, painting by the numbers.”

“That makes no sense at all,” remarked Alison, which was the first sensible thing anyone had said about it all day.

Callie picked up her tray and walked away from the table, pointedly ignoring them both. After all,
they
hadn't heard Alabas, hadn't seen the dancing rats.

Rats!
She grew obsessed with them. By the last period, the three rats in the alley had grown in her mind to several thousands, much as they had in Gringras' silly story. And Josee and Alison were no longer speaking to her.

Which,
Callie told herself,
is just as well as they aren't saying anything of interest.

Her last class was Spanish.

Señora Bastanada had asked something simple, but Callie's mind wandered back again to last night. She could almost hear the piping of Gringras' flute, could smell the dark, close, garbage-strewn alley, could feel the shiver of cold along her spine.

“Señorita McCallan,”
the teacher was saying, but Callie didn't hear her until the third time.
“¿Callie McCallan, dónde esta usted?”

Callie looked up to see everyone staring at her, and said the first thing that came into her head. “Rats! Dirty rats!”

“En Español, por favor.”

She thought a minute.
“¿Ratons con manos negres?”

Everyone laughed. Even Señora Bastanada.

The bell saved her from a detention, and she hurried back to the journalism room, determined to write the story—rats and all.

Suddenly she remembered an old poem about the Pied Piper of Hamelin which her mother used to recite:
“Rats! They fought the dogs and killed the cats, and bit the babies in the cradles, and ate the cheeses out of the vats.…”
Not a fairy tale after all.

“That's it!” she said aloud. Now she knew where the story would start. Not just with the band, but with the rats.

Lots of rats.

She signed in on the computer, put her name at the top, and began.

Calcephony McCallan

HAMELIN COMES AGAIN

Last night, the Pied Piper came to the Valley. His name is Peter Gringras. But who will pay the piper this time?

It may seem strange, impossible even, but what if Peter Gringras, that rock-and-roll legend, is really the Pied Piper? Not of Northampton, but of Hamelin.

That's right, Hamelin. Remember the rats?

She printed out what she had, read it over, and sighed. “I've lost my stupid mind,” she whispered, crumpling up the paper and two-pointing it into the waste basket. It gave her no pleasure. “How can I be so gullible?” she said knowing that the dictionary would say that
gullible
meant “easily fooled.” It was one of Mars' favorite words.

Then she put her head in her hands. The memory of the three little brown rats made her sit up again. She turned back to the computer, got onto Google again, and this time looked up
Hamelin.
There was stuff about the legend and stuff about the real place. Those articles sent her to sites about the Children's Crusade, the little princes in the tower, about other kinds of missing children, faces on milk bottles, the Atlanta child murders, and lots about child abuse. None of it was pleasant reading. She was sorry she'd gotten involved.

Erasing the two paragraphs she'd already written, she started again.

Last night, a Pied Piper came to the Valley. His name is Peter Gringras. He and his band, Brass Rat, played their hearts out for over 5,000 appreciative fans.

Then rock legend Gringras found himself stiffed by the concert promoter after the gig. He was not paid what his contract called for. So will he, like the Pied Piper in the old story, take out his anger not on the rats but on the children of Northampton …

She couldn't figure out where to go from there. It certainly wasn't journalism, but a kind of bizarre fiction. No one would put it in the school paper this way. Nor did she think it belonged there. It made no sense, no proper sense. It was about mystery, magic, and leaps of faith. Journalism had to be about real things, about facts.

So, she printed out what she had, including all the bits of research she'd gleaned from the Google search, closed her eyes, and tried to think.

But all she could think was:
My parents are going to kill me if I write this and get a D for Dumb and Dumber.

“I'll call Mars,” she told herself. Even when her parents ignored her, or got on her case, Mars could be counted on. “He'll know what to do.”

12 · Tricks or Treats

Callie was still sitting with her eyes closed when Jamsie the janitor came into the room. He wasn't very quiet about it, setting his mop pail down with a bang.

“Whatcha doin, Carrot Top?” he growled. His tone sounded threatening though the words were not.

Callie looked up and saw him scowling at her. His wild white hair seemed even less combed than usual. She'd never liked him, especially because he always called her Carrot Top.

“Thinking,” she said.

“Well, do yer thinking some'ere else,” he snarled. “I gotta clean up here. “'Sides, school isn't no place for thinking.” He shook the mop at her.

Suddenly she realized that she and Jamsie were probably the only two people left in the school, and that he could easily murder her, cut her up, and hide the pieces in his broom closet with no one the wiser.

Right,
she thought,
scare yourself silly over a bad-tempered janitor. Like this is
Friday the 13th
or some other dumb movie.
Clearly, fiction was becoming her new way of thinking.

She grabbed up the beginning of her article and her book bag, then left the school almost at a run. She'd hate to have her parents tell the police, “We told her so.” It didn't occur to her, until she was two blocks away and pedaling fast, what Jamsie had said.

“School isn't no place for thinking!” she repeated, and then began laughing so hard, she almost went right past her street.

“Calcephony McCallan, where
have
you been?” her mother began the moment Callie walked in. “I was about ready to call the police.”

“Doing homework, Mom. At school.”

“School is no place for homework…” her mother said.

Callie laughed. “The janitor just said something like that. He said school was no place for thinking.…”

“Don't get smart with me, young…” Her finger was pointing at Callie.

“But, Mom, I'm
agreeing
with you.”

Her mother took a moment, then laughed with her. “You're right. Must be last night's excitement and lack of sleep. I was just worried you wouldn't get back in time.”

“Back in time for dinner? Do I ever miss a meal?” Callie asked.

“Back in time for trick-or-treating.”

Callie mentally thwacked her head with the palm of her hand. How could she have forgotten? She'd promised to take Nick out this year because Mom and Dad were going off to a Halloween party themselves. How surprised and happy she'd been when they proposed it. Finally they were letting her off the leash. Well, at least loosening the leash a little. After all, she and Nick would be out with all the other neighborhood kids.

Plunging her hand into her backpack, Callie pulled out the paper with the two paragraphs and waved it in front of her mother's eyes. “Two paragraphs! That's all I've got so far, Mom. And it's due tomorrow.”

Her mother put her head to one side and gave Callie the you-should-have-known-better look. “Then you should have started earlier.”

Callie was ready to cry. “It's the article about last night's concert, Mom. I couldn't have started it any earlier. That's why I stayed after school. I was trying my hardest to get it done because I'd promised Nicky I'd take him tonight. Only, you see, I can't. And I wanted to.… I
really
wanted to.”

Her mother gave her a considering look. “Oh—that article. Well, you tried, Callie, and that's what's important.”

Callie knuckled her eyes to get rid of the tears. She hated crying. It made her face splotchy. A redhead with splotches was the worst!

“So finish your paper, and I'll get the Piatts to take him. But no leaving the house.” This time she put her finger up to emphasize what she was saying. It was like an exclamation point.

Suddenly grinning, Callie gave her mom a hug. “You're the greatest!”

“Well…”

“Oh—and I need to call Mars.”

“Now?”

“I need his help on the paper.”

Her mother looked at her with a strange expression on her face, part annoyance and part hurt. “Can't I help?”

“It's a … thing about magic and mystery, Mom.”

“That's Mars all right.” Shrugging, her mother went up the stairs. “Dinner in an hour. Right now I have to turn myself into a witch.”

Callie resisted the obvious and went to the phone. Dialing the frat house, she told the boy who answered that she wanted to speak to Mars McCallan.

“So does everybody,” he said. Then he shouted Mars' name loud enough to blast Callie's ears.

When Mars took the phone, Callie plunged in without any explanation. “It's bizarre and strange, and scary, too,” she said.

“Whoa, little sister, make it fast. I have a Halloween party to run.” Then he laughed. Mars always laughed, a waterfall of sound.

“There's this rock group—the Brass Rat.…”

“I know them. Rock and reel. ‘Exile' is a real existential anthem.”

“Define
existential
?” She hated not knowing what things meant.

“You'll need to take Philosophy 101 when you get to college.” He laughed again. “The dictionary definition just won't do.”

She sat on the bottom step of the stairs and wound the long phone cord around her hand. Her parents refused to get a cordless. They said it only encouraged people to lose the phone. “This is not a joke, Mars. I saw dancing rats, and they take souls, and…”

“Happy Halloween, Sis,” he said. “Thanks for the trick. Though it makes no sense. I'll send you a treat later. Got a couple hundred people about to arrive in costume and me not even dressed yet. I'm going as Oberon. You know—the fairy king.” And he hung up.

Callie stared at the phone for a long moment. The buzz it made was so much like a raspberry, she was surprised the phone didn't stick out a tongue at her.

How can Mars do that?
she wondered.
How can he treat me that way?
He had always been her champion, her white knight. He was the one who put Band-Aids on her scrapes and kept the bullies away. And now his stupid party was more important than … than …

Than what?
Her fictions? Callie shook her head, hung up the phone, and went up the stairs. Once in her room she entered the two paragraphs she'd written in school into her computer.