Through Dark Angles: Works Inspired by H. P. Lovecraft (29 page)

It wasn’t
entirely
a rat. Its head was too big, and it had hands like a man. It even had something of a face.

The trot became a run. Some golden nuggets fell from the runners. A sparkly path lay in their wake like the breadcrumbs of Hansel and Gretel.

The rats began to squeak. The aldermen ran faster. They spied the gate.

They couldn’t shut it behind them, so they threw their torches down and made a fire across the opening. They gathered the dead limbs from the scraggly bushes the workers had cleared away until they had a great fire.

It was dusk, and they trudged back toward their village.

They never spoke of the caverns. When the families of the workers asked after them, the alderman claimed a foreign prince had paid them to join his army. They augmented their tale with gold, and it was believed. Soon their gold had its effect. They built houses, repaired walls, built a cathedral. People moved to Hamelin. All was well for years. Some village gossips suggested that the town’s leaders had sold the workers, but how could such things be said of such pious men? They went to Mass every Sunday; they gave to the monks and the poor. And in time they died off. They died young but uneventfully with one exception: when the mayor died, his house was overrun with rats. They even defiled his corpse.

Years passed. There was a new mayor, and new aldermen. The city prospered. One summer people began complaining of bites. Flea bites. Everyone itched; most children scratched themselves bloody. Some broke into a terrible fever where big black sores broke out on the skin. Doctors gave out sachets of useless herbs, priests prayed. Even the local witch tried her hand at stopping the fever. The rat population increased. Rats bit babies and the elderly. Rats ate grain and flour. Rats scurried across the dinner table. Rats reared their ugly heads on the cathedral’s altar. Rats stole the body of Christ from the priest’s hands.

People were leaving. Everyone was complaining. The mayor offered a thousand guilders to anyone who could get rid of the rat problem. Then two thousand guilders.

One day, the shortest adult anyone had seen came to town. He wore a fool’s motley. He came into town riding a large brown dog that growled fiercely when anyone drew near. And he let it be known that he was expert in dealing with rats. In spite of his tiny stature, he was perfectly formed. It was as though the finest sculptor had made the little man from white marble. The mayor summoned him at once.

“I want twice my weight in gold,” announced the dwarf.

No one made a jest. A previous mayor had told them that a very ugly little person might show up some day claiming gold. He should be paid. But surely this handsome young man was not the imp of legend. They viewed beauty and ugliness as surface things.

“How will you deal with the rats?”

“That is my business.”

His exorbitant price was agreed to. The dwarf pulled a syrinx from his pack and began to play the most unearthly melody. Rats ran up from the sewers, rats ran out of the spaces between the walls. Rats came from the banks of the Weser. Rats poured out of holes in the cemetery. The dwarf paused to call his dog. He mounted the strange steed, and the dog began trotting off through the woods. The huge, smelly, chittering pack of rats followed him. The mayor and the aldermen followed. The dwarf rode to the west to Klüt Hill. The region was said to be haunted. When the dwarf arrived he began playing with fiendish energy. The rats screamed and began to pour into a large stone door cut into the side of the hill. It took several minutes for the living tide to go through the half-opened door. The dwarf dismounted and kicked the door. It swung shut with a huge crash.

The dwarf stopped his piping.

“I am ready for my gold,” he said.

The mayor replied that it would take a few days to assemble the gold, but that he would put the dwarf up in his own home. He spared no expense. He brought women and wine and the finest foods that the town could manage. The town council met at midnight.

The mayor told them that if they paid the dwarf his fee the town would be bankrupt. It was agreed then. The mayor would kill the dwarf while he slept. It was a sad thing, but it ensured their jobs and the city’s welfare. The mayor set off to his home.

The next day the dwarf rode his dog to the town hall. The mayor was nowhere to be seen. The dwarf announced that he would collect his fee in three days. The aldermen demurred, saying they could not pay the amount requested. He rode off to the west.

For three days the town attempted to gather as much gold as it could. Truth be told, a good deal of gold was hidden around the town in the fine homes of the aldermen who had dealt so badly with another dwarf a hundred years ago. These families loved their gold and kept most of it. The little man would have to be satisfied. The dwarf rode into town. The small pile was offered to him.

“This is too little, this is too late!” He made no move to gather the gold, but rode away again. The walls were sealed that night and all the good citizens locked their doors. An hour after sunset the piping began. It came from everywhere or nowhere. It echoed round the bones. People tried to block their ears, but unlike Odysseus’ sailors, the mad piping came through. The children began to dance. Parents tried to stop them. One father even broke his son’s leg, but they danced. After an hour of dancing and piping the children went out of doors. If their parents restrained them, they fought. They battered walls with their heads, bit their parents’ arms, screamed in an unknown tongue. So they were let out of their homes. After they had screamed at the town gate it was opened.

In the moonlight stood the pied piper and his dog. He set off for Klüt Hill. Some brave souls followed, but most ran back in their homes and barricaded the doors. The dwarf played madly. All the children save for the lad with the recently broken leg entered through the gate into the hill. The dwarf walked in behind them. The great gate slammed shut. The lame boy beat against the door until his fists were bloody. For three days he listened to the screams and the music.

Then the townspeople came and covered the door with stones and dirt. Europe forgot as a new disease began spreading—the Black Death the rats brought. Who in the face of such horror can remember a fairy tale?

Hamelin became a city with four great forts. A watch was kept on Klüt Hill for nearly seven hundred years. Only once in the twentieth century was anything untoward seen there. A short man, but by no means a dwarf, was said to be seen digging himself free from the earth. He later rose to power, but being denounced by a woodsman who believed in fairy tales did not stop his career. Some did think the man had a rodentlike cast to his face, but such remarks were dangerous to utter.

Since then all has been quiet on Klüt Hill. The tales are forgotten, and no one believes in the Pied Piper.

(
For Richard Lupoff
)

Nathan Pedersen was at a great place. He was three-quarters of the way done with his thesis. He would finish two months ahead of time. His father had only received a GED, his mom had dropped out of high school to have him, his granny had two semesters at a junior college. Everybody was so proud, and then he met the nutcase. All that happened to Nathan can be blamed on the fact that was ahead of schedule; if deadlines were looming, he would have never gone on the trip that weekend. If you learn anything from this fable, kids, it’s this: put off your schoolwork to the last minute.

Nathan had chosen English because his mom and dad both had suffered with English at Sam Houston High School in Doublesign, Texas. Nathan had an amazing academic life considering that none of his people had made it through college. He was valedictorian at Sam Houston High, he got a full scholarship to Rice University in Houston, he graduated with honors and went on to Yale. All his schools didn’t know what to do with him as a data entry—he was brown and spoke Spanish like his mom, Juanita Pedersen, but his surname made him an Anglo. His mom and dad lived in a two-bedroom house with warped wooden floors and cracked stucco. Neither of them had ever read a book for pleasure, neither of them had any clue about why Nathan was so smart, neither of them could be any prouder of their son. Everyone in the Doublesign Pentecostal church had seen Juanita’s photos. Every drinker in the Shamrock Bar had heard Rolf’s sagas about his son. His teachers at the high school still sent him Christmas cards jokingly warning him about New Haven’s winters. Nathan worked hard, had high self-esteem, and had never been really frightened of anyone or anything in his life.

The nutcase was a different story. He would have dropped out of school because of a drug problem, and he knew more about fear than most humans ever should.

Nathan was writing about Washington Irving’s source material. He sought out folklore, fakelore, and contemporary writings. He felt he had uncovered almost all Irving’s sources, certainly every source that could be uncovered. Dr. Winslow Tyler, his thesis advisor, foresaw a great teaching career for Nathan, as well as the possibility of reworking his thesis into a popular book. Dr. Tyler urged Nathan to practice reaching out to a literate audience. So, with the backing of the English department, Nathan arranged a Halloween reading of “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” followed by a mini-lecture about Washington Irving. He impressed the crowd by telling them how Washington Irving had read young Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” in manuscript and helped Poe revise it. He recounted Irving’s suggestion to Francis Scott Key, “Francis, you set your poem ‘The Defense of Fort McHenry’ to music, it could catch on. Why not call it ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’?”

“You know, folks, growing up in Texas I always thought that song was about my cousin—you know, José, can you see?”

The audience loved it—undergraduates, graduate students, even some townies. What could be more American—a young brown from Texas, talking about one of the people that gave birth to American literature on Halloween, the most American of all holidays?

A slightly fat, gray-and-black-haired man came up to him after the applause. The guy looked to be in his forties, didn’t look crazy, and you’d never have guessed that he had had electroshock therapy. He had congenital blue eyes and scars on his lower lip like two knife cuts.

“Dr. Pedersen,” he began.

“Not ‘doctor’ yet,” Nathan countered.

“OK, Mr. Pedersen, I loved your talk. I may have something for you. My late father was an amateur Irving scholar. I’ve still got his papers, I tried to give them to Yale a few years ago, but since Dad never finished his doctorate, they weren’t interested. I know Dad would really have loved it if somebody could make use of them. I mean, I don’t know if they’re groundbreaking scholarship. I run a coffee shop, but I would love it if he could be mentioned in a footnote somewhere.”

“I would love to look his stuff over.”

“Thank you. I could drop them off to you, or if you come by Brewed Awakening I’d treat you to coffee and danish and my dad’s story.”

“That’s in North Haven, right? I loved the pun.”

“We’re on the 300 block on Washington. I know the street is named after the general, but for Dad’s sake, pretend it’s named after Washington Irving. Drop by any afternoon. This would be a big deal to Dad—being part of real scholarship. You know he was the first in his family to go to college; he didn’t get to finish, the recession, so it would have meant so much.”

Thus works fate.

Nathan stopped by Brewed Awakening next Tuesday afternoon. It had been an especially cold fall, snow mixed with fallen leaves, and the black squirrels of the Yale campus had gone into hibernation. Nathan had a strong oversized mocha and a diamond shaped piece of Brewed Awakenings’ “Choclava.” Max Bowen handed him a large brown envelope of yellowed typescript.

“These were before the era of the personal computer. I remember how proud Dad was of his Selectric II. I remember watching him type and that little typeball thing spin and make the letters.”

“So you father was in Yale or UConn?” asked Nathan.

“He was a Yalie. It was his senior project. He had tracked down some Indian legend, a Lenape legend of the ‘Sleepers,’ which Irving had heard during his time in the Catskills. He later used the story in ‘Rip Van Winkle.’”

“Wow. I have been looking at Irving’s sources for a couple of years and I had never heard of it; that is exactly what I am doing my dissertation on. If I can follow your father’s research he’ll be more than a footnote. I can’t think you enough—if it pans out, I mean. But I have to level with you, there are pretty strong links showing that Irving took his story from the German folktale of Peter Klaus or the Christian legend of the Sleepers of Ephesus.”

“Oh, it will pan out. Dad was methodical. He left no stone unturned.”

“So economics made him leave school?”

“There was a downturn in the early seventies. Dad’s family used to own a restaurant just a couple of blocks from here—Tom’s Grinders. It went out of business, Granddad had a stroke, Dad started working as a short-order cook.”

“If it’s not personal, what happened to him?”

“Lung cancer. Dad could never wean himself from the cancer sticks.”

“I’m sorry. What was your father’s name?”

“Just like me, Max Bowen.”

The packet contained the beginning of a research paper, a spiral notebook that seemed to have served as Bowen’s journal, and four or five Xeroxed articles or excerpts from books.

The first article was about Lenape legends. It was from the 1923
American Indian Culture and Research Journal,
“The Concept of ‘Real People’ in Unmai Folk-Stories” by Clifford Johnstone. Dr. Johnstone had collected verbal folklore from a “southern” Lenape (or, as the English had called them, a “Delaware”). He had asked his informant if the term “Leni Lenape” or “Real People” expressed anything more than xenophobia. The informant claimed that there were nonhuman races living in the hollow hills of the Lenapehoking. These dwarfs—Johnstone had used the unfortunate term “Leprechauns”—were to be avoided. One bought them off by leaving dressed deer carcasses in the spring and the “Three Sisters”—corn, squash, and beans—in the fall. These creatures had the ability to steal human souls and use them for prolonged periods in some sort of sorcerous endeavor. Their victims lay in a deathlike sleep for decades and were often buried alive. They were given the name Pagwadjininì, which Dr. Johnstone translated as “Sleepers.” Apparently these guys were not exactly human in shape, but could pass for humans if spotted at a great enough distance.