Pied Piper
A girl enters the ancient weald, with a thing shaped like a little boy.
Pied Piper
a Susurrant Horror story
“You want to see the lost girl, don’t you?”
Lauren nodded, because she did. Right now, she wanted to see it – her – more than anything, for reasons she couldn’t quite explain.
The Weald opened up her and the thing by her side which was wearing the shape of a little boy. Light scattered through the canopy of leaves above, a glistening but speckled amber. Ahead, only darkness, seeping from the knolls and twists of the rowans.
The Weald was old. Very old. There were things there that Lauren had never known before, and certainly which never had existed back in London. Not even in the stories her mother told her. Strange and forgotten things.
“It’s only a little into the trees,” the thing-as-a-boy whispered faintly, looking back at her under the amber light with a wry little grin.
Very old things.
Lauren was not stupid. “You’re a clever little one, aren’t you?” Her father had once said.
And it was true. She had been top of her class, before the threat of the bombs. Before the sirens and the whispers of oblivion and ruin from above. Before she was sent here, to the ancient houses overlooking the Weald.
She wasn’t stupid, and she knew that this boy wasn’t a boy at all. It looked like one, yes. It wanted something, too. But nonetheless, she followed. She wasn’t sure why she followed, despite knowing that the boy was something else. It might have been the music. Strange and invisible music, like chimes, drifting from across the Weald – but only when the boy was present. It was a lullaby. It was peaceful.
She didn’t know when she knew the boy was something other. The thing was…sloppy, perhaps. It was like a pale shadow of a person, dressed all in grey and white. The housekeeper did not know of the child, and yet he hovered like a shade at the boundary of the trees that announced the beginning of the Weald. She saw him in the morning at her window, which was slick with condensation from the rising fog. She saw him last thing at night, when the curlews had begun their distant shrieking. She saw him in her mind in her sleep, and saw him unfolding into something else.
She had spoken to him, keeping a respectable distance, as that same fog licked at her ankles and shrouded their words. She had asked the questions a thing might expect to be asked. “Do you live here? Where is your family?”
The answers had been avoidant. But she expected that.
She asked more questions now, as the heart of the Weald embraced them. As it drew them into its own strange, shadowy silence. As the trees seemed to rise higher, and blot out even the little of the ambient, golden light. “What is the lost girl like?”
The boy walked strangely, as though he could not consider the question and focus on ambling at the same time. For a half second, he descended into a small crouch, before remembering this was not how little boys walked. “She is clever.”
“Does she speak?”
“Oh yes. She is speaking right now. Can’t you hear her? The trees absorb her every word. They thrive upon it.”
They continued. The emerging roots of the trees now seemed to grasp at her as she walked, as if they sought to pull her into the earth. Deep down, away from everything. The fog was rising now – or was it descending from the sky? – and Lauren’s breath felt heavy with it.
Even in the half-light, she could see the strength of the boughs. Not a furrow or scratch. How long had they endured here?
Lauren’s home had not been so durable.
She remembered the tears. The far-off explosions. And above all, the siren and the chaos it summoned. The long nights of darkness, where even the tallow of a candle seemed like a great and objectionable sin.
She remembered her father leaving.
She remembered him coming home, but that had only been a dream. Many dreams.
He had not come home.
The father that had thought her so clever.
So clever that she could see through the disguise of a strange thing in an old wood.
She remembered her mother, crying so many tears that it seemed that she had nothing else left to give. She had nothing left to give Lauren, in any case. Only a dismissal. “There is a nice family, up in Stowton Weald. It’s too dangerous here now. It’s no place for a child. They’ll take you in.”
“Will there be other children there, mum?”
“I don’t know.”
She had said this casually, and languidly. She hadn’t known, or cared. It wasn’t her fault, but she hadn’t cared. The darkness, and the screeching of the sirens, had scoured it out of her.
Lauren dreamt of her mum sometimes, but it was only her as a shadow.
Instead, the shape of this thing had taken her place in the visions of the night. This thing which promised her a look at a lost little girl.
But Lauren knew that in truth, that was not what it offered.
The boy-thing stopped, and remained still without turning. In the haze of darkness and mist his figure seemed to waver, distort.
There was no light here now, in the darkest heart of the Weald.
Lauren wasn’t afraid. She had spent so many nights being afraid that, much like her mum, she had nothing else to give.
“You aren’t going to show me a lost girl.” She said it plaintively. It was not a question. She was done with questions.
The boy was no longer a boy, but had become slick oil-and-shadow in the air. It talked to her, but as it did so it adhered to the thick rowan tree nearby which Lauren had at first not even seen. It was so stolid. So ancient. So enduring.
“All girls are lost, in the deep of the Weald,” the creature echoed, from no place in the dark and from everywhere. A fragment of its face hovered in the fog, though the boy-disguise had gone and been replaced by shadow. That ethereal face seemed…confused….as Lauren approached the tree.
She touched it, delicately. “You’re very old.”
The face was suddenly all of the mist around them, and began to weave itself around her form. Around her voice. It had recovered from its momentary confusion. “Yes. I am old indeed. Old beyond reckoning. While the tribes of men have risen and fallen, I have grown. To be part of me is to…”
But Lauren interjected. Yes, the trunk was so strong. Little dimples ran up and down its spine, memories of the quiet world that lived here. The Weald was all so quiet, and so enclosed. Flashes of the dark and the candles and the sirens – always the blaring sirens, forever – span across her mind. She unburied memories of the grief of losing her father. Of her mother’s calm disdain. Of herself as a burden. “Will it be quiet? Will the noises stop?”
The creature-of-the-tree smiled wide and the tendrils of the fog of the Weald coalesced. That smile had been a wicked grin, but it morphed into something else. Something, if not benevolent, then kind. “We can be as quiet as you like.”
“Forever?”
“Forever.”
Author’s note: ‘Operation Pied Piper’ was the name given to the 1939 United Kingdom operation in which over 1.5 million children were resettled from London and other urban areas to urban spaces which were at less risk of loss of life due to bombing.