Moby Jack & Other Tall Tales (18 page)

‘Don’t cuss,’ said Dan, looking around the ravine nervously, ‘we don’t know how this is happenin’ yet.’

‘You think God’s got a hand in this?’ cried Doc Skimmer, contemptuously. ‘This is more like the work of some crazy people, out looking for vengeance. You know what I mean,’ and he took a puff on his pipe and nodded, his eyes narrowed.

David Werner took this up immediately.

‘You’re saying...by Jesus, you may be right. It makes sense. Revenge killings.’ He turned to Dan Starkly. ‘Get on to the state police. Check out the family who came through here last fall. The Williamsons, they were called.’

Dan’s thickset shoulders dropped, like they always did when he was asked to do something for which he had no taste.

‘What’ll I tell them? I have to tell them somethin’. They’ll want to know
why
the Williamsons have got a grudge against the town. You know how folks feel about that incident now. If it got into the national papers, why, we’d be sneered at by every son of a bitch from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific.’

David Werner knew that Dan was right. Most people in the town would not approve of bringing in outside help if it meant opening a cupboard full of bones.

Several years ago a family—no one even knew where they came from— drove into the town. They had three children in the backseat of their truck, all of them sick. Doc Skimmer was unable to diagnose the fever but it appeared to be serious. He prepared some beds in the back of his surgery. Being a small town the word spread quickly, and soon a deputation of frightened citizens called on Sheriff Watkins. The sheriff then paid a visit to the doctor, telling him the family, named Williamson, had to go on to Alliance, where they had a
hospital which
could deal with such things.

‘Hamelin’s not equipped for highly infectious diseases, you know that Doc. Say we’re sorry, but there’s some supplies been placed by the vehicle, an’ they got to go.’

Doc had argued that Alliance was nearly two hundred miles away and that the children were very weak. The day was hot and dusty.

‘You know what you’re asking? I’ve done what I can for the moment, but they’ll dehydrate on the journey.’

Sheriff Watkins was no man to do battle with, once he had made up his mind on something. Doc Skimmer was not a native of the town, having come there from Lincoln when Doc Albertson died fifteen years previously. He was an outsider who had to be taught his place.

‘Get ’em on the road Doc,’ said the sheriff firmly, ‘or start looking for another town, someplace else.’

Doc Skimmer was old, and weary—too old to go looking for another practice elsewhere. Watkins would throw him out on his neck and still send the Williamsons to hell.

To his eternal shame, the doctor did as he was told, and had regretted it bitterly ever since. Mr Williamson had begged him to let his children stay, to treat them as best he could, but Watkins had dragged the man out to his truck and sat him behind the wheel. The wife had been more aggressive and had attacked both Doc and the Sheriff, first with her small fists, and when this failed, with her tongue.

‘You filthy bastards,’ she shrieked at them, ‘if anything happens to my kids I’ll come back here and tear your eyes out, I swear. How can you
do
this? You’re supposed to be civilised people. You’re nothing but animals.’

Doc, knowing this was true, told lies to
himself
and tried to pacify the woman.

‘The children need to get to a hospital. One that can deal with advanced states of fever. We can’t treat them here. This is a small town, and I’m just a general practitioner. I fix broken bones and give advice for measles, but I’m not equipped to deal with major diseases. Any responsible doctor would do what I’m doing.’

Sometimes, now, he woke in the middle of the night, sweating with guilt. He hoped the rest of the town did the same, for two of the children died on the way to Alliance, and though the rest of the family survived and went on to California, those two little souls stayed to haunt the streets of Hamelin, Nebraska, for as long as memories of the dead lived in the minds of men.

‘Right,’ said David Werner, briskly, ‘this is what we do then. Tonight the whole town stays awake. If the Williamsons are doing this, we’ll get them, we’ll catch them red handed . . . ’ He looked significantly at the other two, but they were in no mood for jokes, so he continued, ‘...we ’ll catch them ourselves. All right, we did wrong once, but I guess four deaths more than pays for that mistake. I think we’re owed, don’t you?’

Dan nodded, his eyes glittering and his hand going automatically to his gun butt. ‘Damn right,’ he said. Here was something he knew how to deal with: direct action against a known enemy. ‘I’ll get people organised,’ he said.

Doc Skimmer remained at the bridge with the body, looking down on it thoughtfully and shaking his head. Finally he took the pipe out of his mouth, refilled it slowly, tamping the tobacco down with a medical spatula he kept in his pocket for the purpose, and said to the corpse:

‘Ain’t you glad you’re out of it?’

Just before midnight they captured seven of them coming over the bridge. They caught them with a fine mesh net that Eb Shaffer had once used to trap small wild birds.

They were just children—hard eyed and not at all
innocent-looking
—but kids just the same. They were all naked, but not the least bit self-conscious about it. When David Werner got them to the town hall under the bright lights, an uncomfortable pricking sensation accompanied his close inspection of them. He felt as if beetles were crawling over his skin, under his shirt, and kept scratching
himself
, almost unconsciously.

‘Where the hell do they come from?’ he whispered to Doc Skimmer.

It was their faces that fascinated the townspeople, all of
whom
had gathered in the hall at the sounding of the church bell. Their faces were smooth and shiny, like the pebbles of streams, polished by time and motion over millennia. Their eyes were like flints, glittering from deep sockets. Though small, the
creatures
—David Werner could think of no other word—were very strong. They now stood in a sullen group, hemmed in by citizens wielding various sharp instruments, shotguns and hunting rifles.

One of the creatures said something in thick guttural accents.

‘What kind of language is that?’ cried David Werner, the hairs on his neck rising. ‘Sounds like something that might come out of the Devil’s mouth.’

Alice Maurer, the librarian, spoke quietly from the back.

‘It’s German,’ she said.

‘German?’ cried Brunnel, the
school teacher
. ‘I know German and I can’t understand what
he’s
saying.’

Alice said, ‘It’s Old German, and I think there’s a heavy dialect there. I studied Old German at university. I can’t catch all of it, but I recognise some of the words.’

‘How old’s old?’ asked Doc.

‘Maybe twelfth, fourteenth century.
Somewhere thereabouts.’

David Werner said to Alice, ‘Can you interpret for us? Can you tell us what that—that creature is saying to us?’

‘I caught the gist of it,’ she replied. ‘It was something like “the Pied Piper is gone” or “dead”. I think it was
dead
.’

There was a stunned silence in the large hall after this remark, as each person in the room, not counting the speaker and those whose words had been translated, stood and pondered on the meaning of this remarkable if incomprehensible piece of information.

Finally, David Werner spoke again.

‘What the hell is that supposed to mean?’

‘The Pied Piper of Hamelin.
He led the children away, into another place, beyond this world.’

‘
I know the goddamn
story
,’ cried David Werner, ‘Jesus Christ
,
this
is
Hamelin
. Some of the folks here are descendants of settlers who came from the original town in Germany. What I want to know is what the fuck it has to do with us, and why these mountain dwarfs are going around killing our people because this guy has died?’

The librarian spoke haltingly to the strange little people, with many repetitions and gestures. Finally there was a terse reply. David Werner could see something in those flinty eyes as the replies were flung back. It was a kind of timelessness, but weary, as if death could not be too soon in coming. These creatures were old, he realised. No, not old,
ancient
. They had seen the coming and going of centuries. It was this realisation that paved the way for the next: he suddenly had an inkling as to what they were—
who
they were— and the thought chilled him through to his heart.

The librarian translated what she had been told.

‘The Piper died in his sleep not long ago, though they have a strange way of expressing time, so I have to guess at several days. They miss him, because his music was like a drug to them. They have difficulty in going on without it. All the good feelings they ever had are now gone, replaced by
a bitterness
as cold and hard as a German winter.

‘They say they are the original children of Hamelin, that time in the Piper’s land is different from here, which is why they still look young. They will never grow old, but they will eventually die, like the Piper—not in the way we do here. Not for many hundreds of our years.’

Again, there was silence. Then someone laughed. Dan Starkly said something like, ‘Heck, we’re in fairyland,’ and grinned at David Werner, looking for approval.

Doc stopped the sneering.

He said to David Werner, ‘Do they look human to you?’

The lawyer shook his head. There
was
something supernatural about these creatures. He could sense it, deep down. It stirred up all the unease of childhood nightmares, brought it to the surface like scum. He had often criticised, when he watched movies, how easily the victims unquestionably accepted paranormal events. Now
he was assailed by the same sort of feelings
. There was no need for logic. This came from the part of the brain, perhaps the soul, where reason did not intervene. It came from a warning system that had been in primitive man, in the human race since the beginning of time: an intuitive, instinctive knowledge.

‘No.’

‘Nor me either. They look like something out of hell. This may be funny to some of you, but four of us are dead, and I’ve a feeling more will follow, even if we lock these creatures away. You can see they’re different. You can
smell
they’re different. I wouldn’t want to bet we ’ve heard the last of this. They’re out to get us for some reason. You can see it in their eyes. They hate our goddamn guts.’

Someone shouted, ‘Ask ’em what the hell they want here? This is America. What’re they murderin’ decent Americans for?’

David Werner nodded to Alice and she went into another long
seemingly-tortured
conversation. Someone went out for coffee, beer and cokes, while this was going on. Dan Starkly asked Bill Smith to fetch him a burger-noonions from Gus’s place, forgetting that Gus was in the hall with everyone else. A dozen other people ordered sandwiches or burgers, and Gus sent Sly Broder his short order cook, with Bill Smith to fill the orders, seeing no reason to turn down a little business.

The drinks and food were in the hall before Alice felt able to pass on her information.

‘As far as I can make out, they think this is Hamelin—the original Hamelin, I mean—and they say that over the years they’ve come to hate us. They say we never went looking for them and we should have paid the Piper in the first place. We broke our promise to him.

‘The Piper’s land is somewhere out
there,
in the clouds or the mists they keep telling me. I don’t know what that means. It’s not in
this
world. I suppose they’re trying to tell us that it’s in another dimension, or something. It’s a beautiful land, with green hills, clear streams and rich forests, but without the Piper’s music, it seems barren. And it’s getting colder. The seasons run in millennia. There was never any snow except on the mountain peaks. The children arrived there in the middle of a thousand year summer. Now the frosts are beginning to come, the leaves are falling, and they realise that winter will eventually freeze over the land.’ She paused and then added, ‘That’s about as much as I can get out of them.’