The Secrets of the Pied Piper 1 Read online

  Also by Matthew Cody

  Powerless

  Super

  Villainous

  The Dead Gentleman

  Will in Scarlet

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2015 by Matthew Cody

  Cover art and interior illustrations copyright © 2015 by Craig Phillips

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Visit us on the Web! randomhousekids.com

  Educators and librarians, for a variety of teaching tools, visit us at RHTeachersLibrarians.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Cody, Matthew.

  The Peddler’s road / Matthew Cody.—First edition.

  p. cm.—(The secrets of the Pied Piper ; 1)

  Summary: While in Germany with their father, who is researching the Pied Piper legend, Max, nearly thirteen, and her brother Carter, ten, are spirited away to the magical land where the stolen children of Hamelin have been hidden since the thirteenth century.

  ISBN 978-0-385-75522-1 (trade)—ISBN 978-0-385-75523-8 (lib. bdg.)— ISBN 978-0-385-75524-5 (ebook)

  [1. Pied Piper of Hamelin (Legendary character)—Fiction. 2. Magic—Fiction. 3. Brothers and sisters—Fiction. 4. Fantasy.] I. Title.

  PZ7.C654Ped 2015

  [Fic]—dc23

  2014041130

  eBook ISBN 9780385755245

  Random House Children’s Books supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.

  v4.1

  ep

  Contents

  Cover

  Also by Matthew Cody

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Map

  Prologue

  Part I: Hamelin

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Part II: New Hamelin

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Part III: The Peddler’s Road

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Part IV: The Winter’s Moon

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Thank You

  About Matthew

  This one’s all for Willem.

  This wall was built in 1556,272 years after the magician stole 130 children away.

  –INSCRIPTION FOUND ON THE OLD TOWN WALL IN HAMELIN, GERMANY

  In the old days at home the Neverland had always begun to look a little dark and threatening by bedtime. Then unexplored patches arose in it and spread; black shadows moved about in them; the roar of the beasts of prey was quite different now, and above all, you lost the certainty that you could win.

  –J. M. BARRIE, PETER PAN AND WENDY

  Detail left

  Detail right

  It’s been four days since the other children left me behind. Father Warner asked me if I would write down exactly what happened. Being a learned boy, I should put my tale to parchment. Memory becomes slippery with age, he said, and someday someone might want to know. They might need to know, lest it ever happen again.

  The men of the village returned this evening in despair. They followed the trail as far as the mountain, but there it stopped. That many feet leave obvious tracks, and yet the footprints disappeared when they reached the base of the mountain. It has been decided that tomorrow the men will use nets to scour the river Weser for bodies, but they will not find any. The children are gone, but they are not dead.

  Grandmother says all we can do now is pray, and that I must stay inside tonight, and tomorrow, too. People are overcome with grief, and if they see that I am still here, they will not understand why only one hundred thirty children were taken—why not one hundred thirty-one? Every other child over the age of three was lost, so why not me? Why spare a lame boy but not their own sons and daughters? What good am I, anyway, with my crutch and my twisted, useless leg—and why are their healthy, strong boys gone, their beautiful daughters vanished?

  People in this state can be dangerous, Grandmother says, even friends and neighbors. She tells a story of when her own mother was just a little girl and the winter was hard and food was scarce, how the townsfolk drove a poor woman and her child out into the snow because they suspected the child’s mother of witchcraft. It is still whispered by some that the woman cursed the village that night and that the rats appeared the very next day. Father Warner says such stories are foolish, but he agrees with Grandmother that even foolish people can do terrible things when they are scared or angry.

  Therefore, I sit in my room and do as the priest asks of me, and write by candlelight while the church bells ring in the square. Grandmother always says they ring for the poor souls wandering in Purgatory, but tonight I think they ring for the living.

  I think the rest of the children would have left me, but Lukas was always uncommonly kind. It was he who knocked on my window on the night after the Piper drove the rats from our village. There wasn’t a child alive in Hamelin who hadn’t been bitten in the crib, and the creatures haunted our dreams. When the other boys my age were going out to take their revenge by throwing stones at the rats in the alleyways, Lukas would sometimes invite me along. But I did not like the names the other children called me, and I did not like the sounds the rats made when the stones hit. I would tell him my leg hurt too much, or that I had to work in Father’s shop. “Tomorrow,” I promised. Always tomorrow. Lukas never argued. “Tomorrow, then,” he would say, and that was that.

  I suppose that was why, when I woke up to find him tapping on my window shutter, I was not afraid, even though I could not imagine what he would be doing there at that time of night, with the moon so high in the sky. “Listen, Timm,” he whispered through the shutter cracks. “Can you hear it?”

  At first I thought he might be walking in his sleep and that this was all part of a dream, but then I heard it, too. Far away still, but clear as a prayer bell. I think by that time the Piper must have reached the north gate, where he had gathered most of the children. It was only the very small ones and the stragglers that were still missing.

  It is hard to describe what that music sounded like, and I cannot reproduce the melod
y, though many have since asked me to try. The best I can do is to say that it made me sad. Unbearably so. It was a mournful piping without words, yet it spoke to me and told me how sorry it was for our place here, for our brief lives yet to come.

  Lukas helped me through my window. He held my crutches as I climbed, and he caught me when I fell. Once outside, I saw that other shapes were moving in the dark. The few remaining children, desperate not to be left behind, ran toward the song. Lukas could have left me, but he did not. I hobbled along as best I could, and he kept pace with me as we answered the Piper’s call.

  I could not see the Piper clearly as we marched out of Hamelin. He was far away, at the head of the line, and all I saw was a glimpse of his hood and his motley coat in the moonlight, with its red, yellow and green patches sewn into it. But the music was stronger now. As we left the city walls and set out across the fields toward the mountain woods, the song in my head disappeared, and in its place a landscape filled my heart.

  Sunlight. Green trees and sweet flowers. Fireflies in the shade. Honey dripping from the trees and warm summer air. Games and toadstools and magic. Real magic. A land older than time, where we would stay young forever. This was where we were going, and the farther we traveled from our homes, the less sad I felt. My despair began to lift, and I knew that I would soon be leaving all my cares and pains behind me.

  I have not told Father Warner this, but it felt like the way he describes heaven.

  Alas, in the end, I could not keep pace. My crutches lodged in the mud, and I tripped on a root hidden in the dark. Eventually, even the smallest children passed me by until the only one left was Lukas. The line was disappearing ahead of us, into a cave under the mountain. But they weren’t walking into darkness; they were walking into sunlight. One by one they entered, and then the light began to fade. It dwindled until it looked like just a pinhole at the end of that long tunnel. The doorway to the promised land was closing, and my sadness returned. Heavy and heartbreaking.

  I do not blame Lukas for running on ahead. If I could have dropped my crutches and run, I would have. I would have left him behind. I would have run even if my leg had snapped beneath me. Then I would have crawled. But by this point, even crawling was an agony. Lukas looked back at me once, I think, though I cannot be sure. Before long, he too disappeared into the mountain.

  I lay there for a time, listening to the music getting softer and softer, until it finally faded to silence. Then, like a baby, I cried myself to sleep.

  The townsfolk found me at sunrise, shivering in the mud. I told them what had happened, and at first they did not believe me. But the tracks were impossible to ignore, and so a search party made up of the men of our village set out to look for the missing children.

  Four days of useless searching.

  Father Warner tells me that I am blessed. That God in His wisdom made my leg this way so that I would be spared, so that I could stay behind and warn others of the Piper in the pied coat, and of the dangers of bargaining with such a man, if man he was.

  There will be funerals, I suppose, although the children are not dead. I know this in my heart. We will mourn Lukas and all the rest, but I will not cry for them.

  Like the rest of our village, I pray every night. But I do not pray for the children of Hamelin. I pray for me. I pray that the Piper will come back for me, and that I will be allowed to join the rest of the children in the place of sunlight. I dream about it every night.

  I fear I will go mad with dreaming.

  (From the journal of Timm Weaver, 1284)

  Once there was a girl called Max who had pink hair. According to the label on the dye bottle, the hair color was actually Rosa, which the nice lady at the pharmacy assured her translated to “Wild Magenta,” but in the end it turned out to be ordinary pink. The whole process was far messier than Max had expected, and though she’d read that she’d need a second person to really do the job right, she’d decided to tackle it by herself. There wasn’t anyone around to help her, anyway.

  She’d imagined trying out pink hair would be like trying out a new Max. The Max that came in the Wild Magenta bottle would be impulsive and free-spirited and exactly the kind of girl who dyed her hair pink one morning on a whim. But as she stared morosely at the bathroom sink and at all the places the dye had stained the porcelain, she didn’t feel any different at all. She was just…pinker.

  As she examined her new look in the bathroom mirror (she’d accidentally dyed the tip of her left ear, too), her brother, Carter, was banging on the bathroom door, telling her he had to go.

  “What could you possibly be doing in there that would take this long?” her brother complained from the other side of the door, and “If I have to break the door, we’ll both be sorry, especially me, because the door looks really, really sturdy.”

  Max turned the lock and yanked the door open in one quick motion. She was so fast that Carter was left banging on nothing at all for a second or two before he realized that the door wasn’t closed anymore.

  Carter had just turned ten, and Max was nearly thirteen, so Max had a good four inches on her younger brother, even when she slouched (which was something she did a lot). She stared down at her brother as she waited for the inevitable snarky quip. There was no way Carter would pass up an opportunity to make fun of her new pink hair. Maybe he’d say she looked like one of those troll dolls you get out of those fifty-cent machines (Max worried that she kind of did). But Carter kept quiet as he shimmied by her, a pained look of concentration on his face as he squeezed his knees together.

  As they passed each other, Max bumped into Carter and he stumbled on his bad leg, barely catching himself on the marble washbasin.

  “Oh! Carter, I’m sorry!” said Max, but her brother waved her away.

  “I’m fine,” he said. “But can I have some privacy, for Pete’s sake?”

  Max stepped out into the hallway as her brother slammed the door shut. The squeaking floorboards beneath her feet made Max think of chewing on tinfoil. The floorboards back at their apartment in the States didn’t creak like that. Their neighbor who smelled like mothballs let her alarm go off for hours in the morning, and you couldn’t sleep at night with the windows open because of the sounds of people spilling out of the bar across the street, but at least the floorboards stayed quiet.

  Carter called to her from behind the bathroom door. “You’ve turned your ear pink, you know,” he said.

  Little monster.

  When Max went down to the kitchen, she found half a carafe of cold coffee on the table and the lingering, apple-y smell of pipe tobacco—the signs of their father’s recent presence. Max peered into the sink and saw ashes and flakes of tobacco gathered around the drain. Their father never emptied his pipe into the trash can for fear of catching it on fire, so he always tapped it out in the sink. Back home, when their mother wasn’t scolding him for smoking, she was scolding him for forgetting to wash the ashes down the drain. For a few months, Max and Carter had even staged an intervention, hiding their father’s pipe whenever they could, but he always managed to produce a spare one, as if by magic.

  Earlier that morning, just after dawn, the sound of the squeaking floorboards had awakened Max, and she’d made it to the bedroom window in time to see their father’s gangly frame as he opened the front gate out onto the street. His glasses were perched askew atop his head as usual, and he was walking lopsidedly with his overstuffed briefcase beneath his arm. In the bed next to Max’s, Carter hadn’t even stirred.

  Now with the kitchen all her own, Max helped herself to what was left of the coffee and picked up one of the German-language newspapers off the table. She liked to play a little game as she flipped through the pages, to see how many English words she could find. She’d just spotted iPhone and Hollywood when the front doorbell buzzed. It was their housekeeper, Mrs. Amsel, waiting on the stoop with a bag of groceries. She was short and squat and had skin so ruddy and wrinkled it looked like leather. And the woman possessed a terrible h
abit of speaking her mind.

  “Mein Gott!” said Mrs. Amsel in her heavily accented English. “This was on purpose?” She poked one finger up at Max’s hair.

  “It’s just hair,” said Max, suddenly and stupidly self-conscious. Why was she embarrassed? Didn’t people dye their hair pink because they wanted other people to look at them? Wasn’t that the whole point?

  “Ah, such things you children do these days,” said Mrs. Amsel, shaking her head.

  “I didn’t think it was a big deal,” said Max, just like a carefree girl would. Care. Free.

  “Mm-hmm,” said Mrs. Amsel. “Well, at least the color makes your cheeks look rosy and plump. Very nice.”

  As the tiny housekeeper brushed past Max and into the house, Max surreptitiously felt her cheeks. “Plump” was certainly not what she was going for.

  Their father had hired Mrs. Amsel to tidy up the house they were renting and to cook meals. The woman also kept an eye on Max and her brother, more for their father’s peace of mind than anything else, Max suspected.

  Mrs. Amsel wiped her forehead with a kerchief. She always wore one over her hair and kept a second one for mopping her sweaty brow. “We’re in for a hot day today!” Then she set the brown paper bag on the kitchen table and began arranging plates of cold cuts and thick, whitish sausages. Next she took out a baguette and a hunk of yellow cheese.