Fair Wages for a Job Well Done

Content warning: spoilers for folk tales.

The woods did not want them there. Dead leaves cracked beneath their feet and silent crows sat in judgement above. The wet reek of rotting autumn was falsely sweet, and the black mud clung to their clothes and dragged them down. The sun never reached the trails on even the brightest day, and when it set, the shadows choked the paths.

Albrecht raised his torch high. The flickering orange teased the darkness and little more. It provided no warmth against the winds that promised winter.

“Conrad!” he called, his voice small. The name was soft, light, and swallowed by the murk around him. A meager meal not worth even an echo.

“Conrad!” called Hille, Albrecht’s wife. She clutched her shawl tight with one hand and held her own light aloft. “Conrad! Ursula!”

No reply.

How many times had they called those names, never once wondering if there’d be an answer? A dozen times a day? A hundred? Sometimes a loving call, other times a sharp reprimand. Oh, what he’d give now, to hear Conrad make up another excuse about shirking his chores – he’d gladly buy the boy’s lie. Or to hear Ursula lament about her prospects in town, how nobody could possibly be good enough. He’d swear to her that he’d find her a prince, and spend the rest of his life seeing it through. He’d give anything for this, and if he’d chance upon the Devil himself, he’d even offer his soul.

But the Devil had more sense than to travel those woods.

Albrecht looked around and saw distant pinpricks of light in the forest. Tiny red eyes constantly blinking, black branches trying to scratch them out. Muffled cries rose from them, from the other townsfolk, all of them shouting their loved ones into the void.

“Otto!”

“Anne!”

“Lena!”

Still no reply.

The forest exhaled another carrion wheeze and all the lights vanished. Albrecht’s torch sputtered in distress, the fire nearly torn from it. He brought it low to shield it with his body, to protect it as he might have done his children. Might have done.

It began raining. Drops as cold as iron cut through the grime on Albrecht’s face. His torch hissed each time it was stabbed. Hille shrunk deeper into her shawl and Albrecht wrapped his arm around her. He couldn’t tell which of them shivered more.

Few of the distant lights returned. Whether that was because of the rain, or the wind, or… but no. They all swore, they would look until they found something. Until they found them. Their children were lost and alone and needed help.

Hille rasped. She was out of tears and too tired for panic. “You should have paid him.”

He couldn’t tell if she really said it, or if it was the same voice that had been nagging at him since morning. The voice that offered no quarter and no reprieve. The voice that ignored every time he agreed with it, every time he begged to make things right. It wasn’t the Devil that tormented him, because it too ignored all his pleading, all his offers to make amends.

What were a thousand guilders? Repairs to the bridge? A new church?

“Fair wages for a job well done,” the piper had said.

But how could Albrecht justify paying anything to that shifty sorcerer? The vagabond diabolist probably cursed their town in the first place.

Still, if he had a second chance to pay now, he’d take it. In the end, a thousand guilders cost them the soul of Hamelin.

“You should have paid him,” Hille whimpered again. She shrugged his arm off as they continued trudging through the benighted woods.

I should have, he thought, but no matter. The deed is done. His gaze fell to his feet. They were so encrusted with mud that they blended into the ground. He couldn’t tell where he ended and the earth began, and the mud pulled at him, dragged him down. I’m already half in the grave. My only hope is finding our children, and I’ll not rest until we do. Only thus will I be redeemed.

And then we’ll revenge ourselves on the piper.

The ground was an oily sea, too deep even for shadows. Albrecht never noticed when the path descended. His foot came down hard on the air and missed, and he tumbled down a sudden hill. Each time he rolled, the frigid mud grabbed more of him, covering his clothes and skin, blotting out his eyes, damming his ears. He tried to scream as he went down, but the mud crawled into his mouth. It seized his tongue, burrowed into his throat. Buried his breath.

He rolled for an eternity, legs smashing trees and arms striking stones. His body learned the language of bruises and breaks, and when he finally stopped, a burning coughing fit overtook him. He could barely rise to his hands and knees, exhuming the dirt in his gullet in wracking waves. Dizziness. Searing wounds. Cold sweat. And when he opened his eyes he was in total darkness.

All he could hear was the splattering of rain, and the only smell was the stench of rotting undergrowth. His hands sunk into the congealed mud, but he also found his fingers wrapping around harder things – stones, maybe, or roots. Perhaps, he imagined, he kneeled before a great tree that would judge him.

“Albrecht!” he heard a faint voice. He looked for it, unable to place the sound and each turn of his neck a fresh shock of pain, but then he saw a thin light behind him. Hille slid carefully down where Albrecht had fallen, holding her torch precariously.

“Here!”

“Albrecht!” On steady ground, she hiked up her skirts and approached him.

He rose to his knees. When the small circle of her light enveloped him, he looked himself over. He was sure he was bleeding, but he couldn’t tell blood from water. It didn’t matter anyway. The mud clung to him, hardened on his skin. The rain only served to fill in the cracks. He could not even see his hands.

But he did see what his hands held. The stones, or roots, his fingers had wrapped around. Curved, short, cracked. White.

They littered the ground at the bottom of the slope: a strange garden of broken white stalks, tinged with red. Some tiny, some as long as forearms. Smooth white stones among them – round, with black holes, almost like eyes.

Hille made a sound, an animal gasp. Her trembling hand covered her mouth. Just as well, there were no words.

A glimmer caught Albrecht’s attention, a glint in the shadows. A pair of eyes. Then another. Then, countless eyes all around him, just at the edge of the light. The rain murdered Hille’s torch, plunging them into darkness again.

He heard the rats before he felt them.