Chapter 9
Inside our unit, the Sky and Pop talk, sitting very close to each other, almost forehead to forehead, their Noise zipping back and forth fast as a flickering light.
It’s also got sound, but there’s nothing in it anyone without Noise–like me, Max, and mom, all of us here, too–could catch.
It’s a conversation so secret, they might as well be having it in space.
“Burly’s still outside,” Max says, looking out the window of our unit.
I push in next to him and look, too. Burly’s standing away from our front door.
The Sky’s guard now circle our entire house, so he looks for all the world like a smiling inspector.
The townspeople are still out there, too, keeping their distance.
“He’s going to need to do something,” Max says, meaning Burly, and I’m always so amazed at how bad my brother is at school when he’s this smart. “To show he’s still in charge, isn’t he?”
I nod. This feels right.
“Oh, shit,” Max says, as we see Margery Wingard sidle up next to Burly. They start having a conversation as private as the one Pop and the Sky are having.
“None of this feels good,” Max says. “Not one bit.”
“Okay,” we hear Pop say. We turn around. The Sky stands, and without another word, not even a goodbye, he leaves our unit.
Outside, we hear Burly say, “Good meeting? Now that you’re here, we’d love to–”
But the Sky walks right past him, directly toward the line of townspeople, as if he doesn’t even see them.
His guard are around him quick as anything, and if the townspeople might not have moved for the Sky–though of course they would have, right?
–they definitely move for the Sky’s guard and the weapons they’re carrying.
Just like that, they’re all gone into the night.
We look back to Pop. “What did he tell you?” Max asks.
“Hold on,” he says, standing. “I need to get Burly.”
“Burly?” Mom says, as surprised as we are.
“As much as he may not like it, he needs to hear this.”
“Needs to hear what?” Burly says, already at our door, Margery Wingard right behind him.
“Is it about the infection they brought us?” she asks.
“Oh, would you just shut it with the infection?” Mom snaps.
“I’ll thank you not to talk to me that way, Viola,” Mrs. Wingard says, ice in her voice.
“Only my friends call me Viola,” Mom smiles. “You can call me Dr. Eade.”
“Shut the door,” Pop says to me. I do, but then, without anyone seeing but me, he stays my hand right at the last second, leaving it unlatched.
“What’s this all about, Todd?” Burly asks. “And what does the leader of the Spackle have to say to you that he couldn’t say to me?”
“Nothing,” Pop says. “I’m going to tell you everything he said.”
“Why didn’t he tell me himself?”
“You got no Noise,” Pop says. “It would have taken forever. Plus, he doesn’t like you. I thought that was pretty obvious. He’s met humans like you before, and that didn’t go very well for him.”
“Humans like me? What’s that supposed–”
“Do you want to hear it or not?” Pop says. “Because honestly, it makes no difference to me, though you probably should, if you want to protect this city like you say.”
Burly isn’t happy with this. Margery Wingard is staring daggers at Mom. “I don’t think Margery needs to be in on this conversation, right?” Mom says.
“Yes,” Pop says. “If I tell Margery direct, then I’ll know for a fact any lies she says in her sermons are of her own creayshun and not because it was secondhand.”
“How dare you!” Margery says.
“Both of you be quiet and sit down,” Pop says. “I’m going to tell you a story.”
We sit. Pop opens up his Noise, letting it fall in the room all around us. And with pictures and words and feelings, in a voice his own but not quite, cleaned up of all his bad grammar and mispronunciations I find so embarrassing, he tells us everything the Sky told him.
THE TALE OF THE PIPER
A young boy of the Land was born with a twisted leg, so gnarled he learned to walk much later than usual and doing so caused him so much pain that his parents, in consultation with the doctor who tended to their town–
(“Town?” Margery interrupts, as we see the pictures of the story happening all around us. “They don’t live in towns. They barely live in villages. And ‘doctor’ is stretching it. It’s too generous to even call them healers.”
“Do you notice in this context, village and healer are words we only use for people who aren’t us?” Mom says. “Words to make sure everyone knows how superior we are.”
And she means this as an insult, but I’m honestly not sure Margery takes it that way.)
In consultation with the doctor, the boy’s parents–with the boy’s agreement–amputated his leg below the main middle joint. They fitted him with a prosthetic, and in the way of the Land, it was a fine piece of engineering. The boy could walk without pain for the first time.
More, the boy could run.
And run he did. He ran his way to school and back.
He ran to the harvest to help his mother and to the fishing grounds to help his father.
He played every sport he could. He even got a nickname, impossible to translate into human language, but it was partly exasperated, partly fond, because the boy was popular.
The townsfolk loved him. He had a crowd of friends.
He was the pride and joy of his parents, and there was no thought of his prosthetic leg slowing him down literally or figuratively in the future.
Then one day, the dreams began.
(“I knew it was spacks,” Margery Wingard says. “I told all of you all along it was spacks, and what did I get? Your derision and your scorn–”
“You’ll not call them that in this house, Margery,” Pop says.
“Call them what?” Margery Wingard says, in an obvious attempt to get my pop to say it.
Pop just keeps telling the story.)
The boy had dreams, and so did all of his friends. They were terrible, terrible dreams. So bad, they infected the Noise of the entire town, making the children of the Land a source of pain and even fear for the adults.
But they loved their children, of course, and so even though a darkness had settled over the town, they searched and searched for a cure. The doctor tried everything he knew, medicines, poultices, even poisons and leeches. Nothing worked. The priestess of the town–
(“Of course, their heathen religion is part of this,” Margery Wingard says.
“If you interrupt again, Margery,” Pop says, voice all flinty, “I’ll ask you to leave.”
Her eyes blaze at that, but she keeps quiet.)
The priestess talked at length to each child in the town, trying to get to the source of their fears. She prayed with them, counseled them, tried to find any way she could to ease their burdens, but nothing lifted the dreams.
She did note, however, that they began with the appearance of a new star in the sky.
(At my side, Max squeezes my arm.)
The Land are not a people given to idle beliefs.
They do not connect signs in the night sky to things that happen here on the ground.
They don’t believe in omens, they don’t believe in prophecy, what they believe in is history.
In the story they’ve always told themselves.
In the one that lives in their ongoing Conversation.
But there was nothing there the priestess found that could explain anything. She proposed they contact their Sky, ask him to describe the dreams and the new star, and that way, they could be looked over and discussed, turned up and down and around and examined and then done so all over again.
If there was no history for these things, they would, at the very least, start one, and perhaps they might even find a solution for the suffering of their youth.
She sent a message through the Conversation, and she was surprised when a man entered the town the very next day. He had heard their message, he said, and he had a solution to their problem. He would play music on his pipes, and that music would soothe the nightmares.
(“This is the pied piper,” Burly says, frowning. “This is a human story. An old one.”
“The Sky put it in terms we could understand,” Pop says. “He found the story in my Noise and it was close to this one, so he used one to explain the other.” We all look at him. “It’s how their history works. Doesn’t mean it’s not true.”
“Hmph,” says Margery Wingard.)
The priestess didn’t believe this answer from the piper.
She consulted the doctor, who said that perhaps it had to do with wavelengths of sound.
This was a guess, though. But both he and the priestess were desperate for solutions, especially in the face of the suffering of their children.
And so they agreed to pay the piper to pipe.
He played his pipes throughout the town that night, as all the children slept. And it worked. Their nightmares calmed immediately, and as the piper played, the Noise of the town returned to what it had been before.
Almost.
For one boy hadn’t slept. The boy with the prosthetic leg.
He had seen the piper enter the town before anyone else, because he had run, though exhausted from troubled sleep, out to the river and back.
He swore to his parents and to the priestess, too, that he had seen no one cross the bridge, the only way into town.
He had been up and down an empty road, and suddenly the piper was already at the town gate, waiting to enter.
He came from nowhere, the boy tried to tell them.
They wouldn’t listen. He was just a boy, after all, and one whose Noise had become infected by the dreams. So the boy decided to keep watch that night and see what the piper did.
But all he saw was the piper piping. There was nothing special to it, no secret that the boy could see. The piper piped his music, and the Noise in the town quietened.
Except for the boy’s own. The piper’s music only worked on those asleep. The piper heard the boy’s Noise and saw him watching. He winked at the boy and disappeared again in the woods.
The next day, everything was different. The Noise of the town had changed, the Noise of the children had changed, the parents were happy, the town was happy, the doctor was happy.
Only the boy and the priestess weren’t happy.
The boy because when he finally had gone to sleep, his dreams were as bad as ever.
And while the doctor was willing to stick with the wavelength argument, something still didn’t sit right with the priestess.
Where had the nightmares come from, after all?
What, if anything, did they have to do with the new star in the sky?
Where was the piper from? How did he know to be here?
When the piper returned for payment, she confronted him.
How did you know we needed help? she asked.
I told you, he said, I heard your message to the Conversation.
How were you so close?
I’m a traveling piper. I go from town to town, hoping to be paid for my entertainment.
And are you often close to this kind of problem? Does it seem to happen just before you appear?
At this the piper smiled. What I hear, he said, is the voice of someone who doesn’t want to pay me.
You hear the voice of someone asking questions, the priestess said. The voice of someone who will have answers before she pays.
You may choose not to pay me, the piper said. But there will be payment, one way or another.
With another smile, he left. When she pursued him, she didn’t find him on the road or in the trees around the town. She couldn’t hear his Noise anywhere.
That night, payment was made.
The piper piped another song as the town slept. The song kept the adults asleep but woke all the children. They left their beds at the sound of it, curious as to what it was, coming together on the road out of town. They began to walk toward the piper, following him as he started moving away.
Only the boy with the prosthetic leg saw what was happening.
He had heard the music, too, but it didn’t call to him like it did the others.
He could see from his window all the other children in town moving down the road, into the darkness of the night.
He tried to wake his parents, but they wouldn’t stir.
The boy could run, though, and run he did.
He ran after the other children, into the darkness.
He ran past the turn in the road they had just taken.
He ran farther when he saw they weren’t there.
He ran and ran and ran until he realized the road he was running down could not exist. He should have reached the river by now.
He should have caught up with the group long ago.
And then he saw them.
The road, the impossible road, came to an end at a cleft in a rock wall. The piper stood before it, still piping to the children as they came toward him.
The boy watched as the piper grew before his eyes, his skin breaking, peeling away, becoming a giant of muscle and bone.
(“Ben,” Max whispers, as we watch a god unfolding on the floor of our living unit.)
He grew to enormous size, still piping his pipes. He played them even as a fire enveloped him, not burning him, but making him blaze with a heat the boy could feel even from a distance. The pipes played as the first of the town’s children reached him.
The piper reached down to the child, picked her up–
And shoved her in his giant, burning, skeletal mouth, tearing her in half, then eating her entirely.
(“Sweet Jesus,” Burly says, because that’s what we’ve just seen. The girl being eaten in horror and gore.)
No! the boy cried out.
But there was nothing he could do. No matter how much more he ran, he couldn’t get closer to the piper or the children, and he had to watch as, one by one, the piper ate them all, tearing them to pieces, swallowing them all down.
Until there were none left.
The piper smiled at the boy who was left behind, then disappeared into the cleft in the rock.