The Man in the Stocks

 Just twenty-five years after the infamous Pied Piper deceived the good people of Hameln, something equally sinister occurred in the history of our town. Now to understand what happened I want you all to picture the town square as you see it now, the center of all commerce and misunderstanding, and imagine the following stores and houses along the milkman’s route which stood from left to right as I point to them…

The saying that arguing between God and science is “like a butcher arguing with a baker that his bread is not meat” originated with this butcher and baker who stood next-door to each other, resulting in the butcher’s apprentice marrying the baker’s breadmaid. They had each ordered a mechanical bread-and-meat slicer (which operated by pumping a foot pedal) from a local inventor realizing too late that they had both ordered the same machine. The inventor died from a mysterious illness leaving just one, and a heated dispute arose as to which of them had the rights to it as they both needed to fill an order for a wedding feast.

It was the milkman who presented the solution that they should share it, by going to the wedding party and arranging for them to order a kind of dish that had not yet been named; slices of meat and bread made from a brisket and a loaf of equal size, divided into portions for guests as one would divide up a pie. The result was placing the machine between the two shops, with the butcher’s boy on side and the baker’s young maid on the other.

Now the boy was the second son of an affluent, austere and astute merchant family of good upbringing, but the maid’s family (whose name was Pilsbury) was only just scraping by and had only her young looks in their favor. As the wedding plans and the union of these two families came together, it was discovered that the lad was suddenly confined to his bed for being extremely weak and sickly, and that the maid had gone pale from the same illness.

Whispers began to circulate that the two lovers had already done something before their marriage vows. The bride’s family suspected that the sausage-grinding knave had already defloured and seeded their breadmistress and passed on to her some pox of the upper classes, while the bridegroom’s family believed an affliction of the poor caused by unsanitary habits had just climbed the social ladder and their son contracted it from the Pilsbury doughgirl.

This argument came to a boil at the feast where the minister, a Reverend Tomey, was seated at the place of honor with one family to the left of him and one to the right, bickering and passing around the little triangular meatcakes. He rose from his chair, tapping his goblet for silence and said calmly to them that he had already heard similar rumors of disease all over town, and therefore there was little point in casting blame as to who caught it from whom because it was already a problem they all shared. Then he beseeched them to trust in God and pray for an end to all suffering.

An unmarried cavalier who was seated at the far end of the banquet wearing his sword stood up and challenged the reverend directly, saying as far as he was concerned they ought to know the cause, as there might be legal ramifications. Depending on who contracted it first one of the two families might owe the other a lot of money for their child’s well-being.

“I will find a man of learning who can provide the answers.” the reverend offered with a cool head. “The ways of science are unknown to most men; they have ways of seeing the unseen that must be pursued before jumping to conclusions. There are many families in similar situations who are all interconnected and may share some common aspect, so what you suggest means investigating not just one couple but hundreds of persons.”

The cavalier (whose name was Charles Spaniel) moved his hand to his hilt suspiciously.

“Well I can’t see God or his science.” he grumbled. “For all I know these men will decide things to serve their own purposes.”

“Then I will question everyone in my congregation until a common thread, person or object is revealed.” the reverend swore up and down with his hand.

The soldier pointed out that not everyone in town was a member of his congregation.

“Well then I will go door-to-door and anyone who does not answer to God can answer to you and your sword.” he said the first thing the cavalier seemed to like, and they got up and left together.

They went first to the alehouse next door to plan their questions and the route they would take through town, discovering the tavern keeper was preparing libations for the very wedding they had just left, although the reverend was more disturbed by the cavalier’s lack of faith. In response the cavalier drained his tankard, drew his rapier and pointed it at the reverend’s chest.

“I could stab you right now and neither God nor science will stop me.” he said with conviction. “So why should I believe in either one?”

“Well since you would die a coward’s death at the gallows for stabbing a priest,” the reverend responded, “I would say a believer in your place is more wise.”. “Not a better man per say, nor necessarily moral, upstanding or chivalrous, just more sensible.”

The man frowned and put his blade back in its sheath.

“Besides,” the reverend whispered, “instead of the tavern keeper preparing the ales for the wedding now, suppose the bride and groom had drank some before they both grew ill?”

The two men approached the tavern keeper who made apologies saying he was indebted to a moneyer, but what the reverend wanted to know was if he knew anyone who had come down with plague. The man insisted his ales were clean because there was something in the distillation that killed whatever it was. Then he added that the reason he was in debt was the moneyer refused to let anyone pay him because he was afraid of touching coins.

The two men proceeded to the counting-house along with a small group of onlookers. There they found two young clerks, both of them brothers born on the same day, unable to pay anyone’s debts to the moneyer who had barricaded himself inside a small room which resembled a brass cage believing currency had some kind of pox on it. The two lads were competitors in wanting a share of the business from him but were unable to pay him themselves.

The cavalier found this ridiculous asking why everyone felt slighted when they were actually richer not paying him. Then he demanded to know since the two clerks had a much greater stack of coin why didn’t that make them the moneyers now since all coins are the same? They answered that the man had all of the town records sequestered with him, to which the cavalier sneered and said paper itself can be rewritten if it is lost by fire or any other reason.

What ultimately prevented the argument from resolving was the two clerks could not agree on which of them should take the moneyer’s place, since there wasn’t a hair of difference between them the cavalier could not even decide which of them to skewer. So the reverend called out to the moneyer through the bars, imploring him to settle this either by choosing his successor or coming out himself.

No answer came. It was decided that the authorities would have to come break it down, so they all went to the jailhouse next door. There they found the jailer sitting by himself with just two cells, a larger open cell made of iron bars that was for common criminals awaiting sentence, and a smaller cell that was completely enclosed with an iron door that had no window except for a food slot at the floor.

The jailer was momentarily overwhelmed by the number of voices trying to explain the situation, then he nodded calmly saying the little secure room where the money and financial records were kept was one he designed himself. Then a convicted man called out from the larger cell saying they had the exact same situation right there. Every man brought in and detained had contracted plague and died from it before sentence, except the one in the enclosed cell who was as healthy as a horse.

The reverend asked about this man. The jailer explained that he had cheated a great deal of the town, a crime that was not expedited by torture on account that the magistrate himself owed him some money. So he was detained in limbo, but the jailer had never actually seen him since constructing the cell.

The reverend was concerned they were straying from their original task, and asked if it was right to barge in on a man who believed he was securing himself from a contagious disease.

“How do you know he is still alive?” the cavalier interjected. The jailer replied there was no smell, and that he was quite a hearty eater.

At their request he walked over with his keys and unlocked the iron door. Pushing it aside, there was a human skeleton on the floor picked clean of every aspect of flesh, and a rat the size of a tub of lard sitting there waiting for the food tray. As they stared at it, the rat turned around and left a human-sized excrement in the empty tray to be removed. Cavalier Charles drew his blade and the rodent disappeared under a door in the back of the tiny cell.

“Where does that lead?” the reverend pointed. They pried it open to reveal a small, empty counting-room shelved with disheveled records and dusty payments. One of the two clerks stepped forward, staring at his own twin who stood perplexed on the other side, and walked straight into a metal mirror breaking his nose.

Thoroughly confused, an increasing number of men began arguing with the cavalier finding it difficult to maintain control. The reverend appeased them only with the promise that they would go immediately to the town library whose scholar was a worldly man of science.

The crowd marched over there and poured into a hallowed chamber filled with books where a bearded, respectable man in black robes sat at his study and raised a single finger to his lips for silence. First the reverend, then several others attempted to share their common dilemma, their voices overlapping. He simply listened until they were tired of speaking.

“Your story is in the wrong order.” he finally opined. “It seems to me you stumbled upon the answer long ago. But on the subject of epidemics, let me show you something…”

He left them for a moment and returned holding out between his thumb and forefinger a small tube of solid glass that appeared to be broken at both ends. It glittered like a jewel and they all gasped.

“With this I can see objects one hundred times too small to be seen with a man’s eye.” he stated. “I acquired it in Vienna, but I should tell you the cause of plague is something we yet cannot see. I am going to write to every man of learning I know of, compile their answers and in time we may be able to discover the cause, but until then I’m afraid it is invisible and therefore there is no legal way to prove who contracted it from whom.”

“Rubbish, there most certainly are ways.” the cavalier objected. “If it was spread by someone who stops at each house in town, then obviously the first household could not possibly have caught it from the last one.”

The scholar put a hand to his gray beard and stroked it.

“Hmm, I suppose there are some conclusions that can be made without the aid of science.” he conceded. “You could say there is no way a bad apple came from a bushel of pears.”

“Yes because science is tripe!” the cavalier lost his patience. “Wealth and property are decided on paper that says anything the scrivener chose to write on it! Science is no different; how do you know these men of letters aren’t frauds or that you even know them? And when you all come to your conclusions why don’t you just make up whatever you please! There was no one in the counting-house, do you grasp my uneducated speech? The whole town runs on commerce and there’s no one in there!”

Charles threw down his scabbard and the scholar rose to his feet and took him by the hand, lowering his voice.

“I think you make quite an educated point, it’s almost too much for me to fathom.” he said. “How do I know I have a brain when it’s my brain that tells me so? How do I know all these books weren’t written by the man in the stocks out there? After all I didn’t see them being written. It’s a shame with your wits you have chosen a life of warfare.”

The crowd behind them was growing and the scholar once again raised his finger for quiet, but bodies were pushing each other forward causing the reverend to fall down on the hilt of the cavalier’s dagger, the point of it sticking him in his own leg and as a result the cavalier forcefully kneed the scholar in the bollocks causing his glass tube to shoot directly up into his nose. They all doubled over, Reverend Tomey holding his stomach, the cavalier dropping to one knee and the scholar holding his groin, a small boy looking in his upturned nose and saying “Oy there are little creatures in there!”.

The scholar sat down and removed the tube from his nostril while the cavalier tied a sash around his thigh, then he reached out for a half-drained bottle of milk sitting on his desk and stopped himself saying “oh dear”. He was already starting to look ill.

The reverend reached out to assist him but the scholar refused.

“It is not myself that concerns me but the poor man I shared a glass with this morning.” he said. “The man I gave a design for a food-processing device.”

He started wheezing and held a kerchief to his face.

“Someone find the milkman and hang him!” the cavalier shouted, leading the crowd outside with his rapier.

A mob of thirty townspeople had assembled when word came that the milkman was found dead from disease in his tub. No record could be found to tell them the number of households on his list; they briefly put their heads together trying to figure out if there was some other way of knowing his route.

“There has to be someone who knows.” the exasperated cavalier’s hairs were standing on end. “All you’d have to do is stand in one place and watch him go from house to house…” he pointed until his blade stopped at the center of the square.

Thirty faces turned and looked at a convicted man wearing the stocks, a padlocked board with holes for the face and hands, on a long chain that hung from a gallows above him. He was someone they were accustomed to ignoring, and now he turned to see a throng of angry people marching across the square toward him.

The man’s reaction was very strange; the weight of the stocks had bent his back and he wore a cap-and-bells on his head which he was unable to remove, and yet at the sight of them he leapt into the air like a sprite, clicking his heels madly behind him.

“I charge you Sir in the name of public welfare to answer something for me!” the cavalier raised the point of his weapon, but he could tell at once that he was looking into the eyes of a madman.

The convicted man lurched forward against the chain, knocking the soldier off his feet with a blow from the wooden stocks to his head, somehow grabbing the sword away from him despite his arms and head being immobilized. Charles landed painfully on his back on the pavestones and stared up at him in astonishment.

The man twirled the sword in his shackled right hand and his eyes rolled giddily from side to side.

“We need information for the safety of the town, something that is nothing to you!” the Reverend Tomey pleaded with him.

“Oh? And who will save you from yourselves?” the man lanced a boil he had been unable to reach.

“Please… We need to know the source of this plague.”

“Well why didn’t you say so?” the man started to carve the palsied skin off his face, then somehow shook himself out of his rags revealing a brilliant particolored garment underneath, a silver flute hanging from his belt.

The reverend bent forward holding his sides as if to vomit and the rest of the crowd backed away holding their faces.

“Yes, say it! I am the bringer of all your woes!” the man danced gleefully. “The man in the iron mask of the red demise, haha! I am Till Eulenspiegel the rat-catcher of Hameln! Killer of laughs and jester of death! That’s right, there is no answer! There is no answer! There is no answer!”

His voice was like a cuckoo, his face a bloody dripping mess. It is said that everyone in sight of him that day contracted plague and was dead by nightfall, their faces writhing in pain.

“And now…” he conducted them, “der Totentanz!”.

He lifted one foot, extending it out to the leg, and then the other in a queer, slow mechanical dance, and still shackled, danced morbidly until dusk.