Once upon a time — and this one's true, or close to it, because something happened in the town of Hamelin in the year 1284 that nobody has ever quite explained — there was a town with a rat problem.
It started small. One rat in a cellar. A couple in the granary. The baker found droppings in the flour. A woman saw one run across her kitchen table. The town shrugged. Rats come and go. It would sort itself out.
It did not sort itself out.
By spring, the rats were everywhere. In the walls. In the beds. In the cradles. In the bread. They ate the grain and the cheese and the soap and the candles and the leather off people's shoes. They ran across the dinner table while families were eating. They nested in the church organ. Children were afraid to walk to school.
People tiptoed through their own town. The cats had given up.
The mayor — a round man with a red face and a chain of office he polished every morning — called a meeting.
"We need a solution," he said, which is what people say when they don't have one.
The next day, a stranger walked into town.
He was tall and thin, with sharp eyes and a coat of patchwork — red and yellow and green, all the wrong colors in all the wrong combinations. He carried a wooden pipe, plain and smooth, nothing special to look at.
He walked into the town hall and stood before the mayor.
"A thousand guilders," he said, "and I will rid your town of every rat."
A thousand guilders was a great deal of money. The council looked at each other. The mayor rubbed his chin.
But the rats had already cost them more than that in grain alone.
"Done," said the mayor. "A thousand guilders. You have our word."
The Piper smiled. It was not a warm smile.
He walked out into the street. He lifted the pipe to his lips. And he played.
The tune was strange. Not the kind of music you'd hum along to — it went past your ears and into somewhere deeper. It was a sound like scurrying and scratching and the dark space behind walls, turned into notes. It spoke to something old and low and hungry.
The rats heard it.
They came out. From the cellars and the kitchens and the walls and the beds and the barns and the church organ. Brown rats and black rats, fat rats and thin rats, old rats and young rats. More rats than anyone had imagined. The streets filled with them — a river of grey and brown, flowing toward the sound of the pipe.
The Piper walked. Slowly, steadily, through the town, playing all the while. The rats followed. Every last one. Out through the gates, down the road, and into the river Weser. The water closed over them. Every last one.
The town was silent. The Piper put the pipe away.
"A thousand guilders," he said.
The mayor didn't pay.
The rats were gone. The emergency was over. And the thing about emergencies is that the math changes as soon as they're over. A thousand guilders felt reasonable when rats were in your children's beds. Now that the streets were clean and the grain was safe, a thousand guilders felt like a lot of money for twenty minutes of pipe-playing.
"Fifty," said the mayor.
"A thousand," said the Piper. "That was the deal."
"Fifty. You played a pipe. It took twenty minutes."
"It took twenty minutes because I'm good at it. The price was a thousand."
"Fifty," said the mayor. "Take it or leave it."
The Piper looked at him for a long time. The mayor didn't look away, because he was the kind of man who confused stubbornness with strength.
"You'll pay," said the Piper. Quietly. "Or you'll wish you had."
He turned and walked out of the town hall. The mayor laughed. His councillors laughed with him. Fifty guilders saved. What was the stranger going to do — bring the rats back?
The Piper came back on a Sunday morning, when the adults were in church.
The children were in the streets. Playing, running, chasing each other through the lanes and alleys the way children do when nobody's watching.
He lifted the pipe and played a different tune.
This one was bright. Happy. It sounded like summer afternoons and no school and bare feet in the grass and everything in the world being exactly okay. It sounded like the best day of your childhood, the one you can almost but not quite remember.
The children heard it. They stopped playing. They turned toward the sound. They smiled.
And they followed.
Down the street, through the gates, out of town. Laughing, skipping, running. The Piper walked ahead, playing, and a hundred and thirty children followed him down the road, toward the mountain.
A door opened in the rock. A door that hadn't been there before. The Piper walked through. The children followed — one after another after another, laughing, dancing, disappearing into the mountain.
The door closed.
One child was left behind. A boy with a bad leg, who couldn't keep up. He stood on the road and watched the mountain seal itself shut.
The parents came out of church. The streets were empty.
The boy told them what happened. They ran to the mountain. They dug at the rock with their hands, with shovels, with picks. They dug until their fingers bled. They called their children's names until their voices gave out.
The mayor offered a thousand guilders. Then two thousand. Then five. Then everything the town had. Then everything it would ever have.
The Piper didn't come back.
They never found the children.
That's how it always goes. You won't pay the fair price to prevent the thing. But you'll pay anything — anything — to undo it.
There is a street in Hamelin where no music is played. Not by law. Just nobody does. They call it the Street of Silence. It's the one the children danced down.
Pay what you owe.
Goodnight to the town of Hamelin, which learned too late.
Goodnight to the Piper and his patchwork coat.
Goodnight to the children, wherever they went.
Goodnight to the boy who couldn't keep up, who remembered everything.
Goodnight.