The Grimm Diaries Prequels Volume 11- 14: Children of Hamlin, Jar of Hearts, Tooth & Nail & Fairy Tale, Ember in the Wind, Welcome to Sorrow, and Happy Valentine's Slay. (8 page)

The Piper was shattered. He had been fooled by people who claimed that they honored God. He wondered why they did that to him. Was it possible that his jester dress had
fool
written all over it? Was is it possible that his cheerful ways and the way he dressed belittled him, and made people take advantage of him?

The only ones who cared for the Piper were the children. They had their noses plastered behind the windows and tears rolling down their eyes.

The children waved goodbye to the Piper, but he didn’t see them.

They sniffed after crying for him, but again, he didn’t see them.

They mouthed his tune—because they were afraid they’d get punished if they sang it aloud—but again, he didn’t hear them, walking away alone and defeated.

If only the Piper had known that the children cared for him, the world would have been spared the evil he brought onto it later. If only.

The Piper didn’t see them because like the rats, he’d already been plagued and blackened with injustice, a word that was easy to say, too hard to deal with its consequences. The demon of revenge had already taken hold of his heart. The cancer of injustice had already eaten at his cheerful soul, leaving a skeleton of a carcass behind, one that could never feel compassion for humans—or anything else—again.

As the Piper walked away he was followed by a mysterious Magpie—which no one knew what it really was until today day.

The town of Hamlin forgot about the Piper, returning to their conservative ways of life and telling stories from time to time. Although they knew the Piper’s melodies had been planted in their children’s hearts, they preferred not to talk about it. When a traveler asked about how they got rid of the rats, they answered, saying, “What rats?”

The Piper’s story had been buried, and they claimed that the town had never been infested in the first place.

Days went by. The sun shone and sank again. Sometimes, it rained. Plants grew. Babies were born. People died. Life had just become monotonous enough to forget about that day, the way so many incidents in history have been forgotten by the sinful act of denial.

But the demon of the past came back, haunting Hamlin on the 26 of July in 1284. The Piper reappeared on a day that changed the history of the world
.

The day was warm and the sun was shining bright. Hamlin was celebrating summer. Everyone was outdoors, talking, cheering, having already forgotten that it was a miracle that they were still alive.

The Piper came back wearing black. It was as if what was once a colorful rainbow in the sky had been eclipsed to eternal darkness. His body was covered from head to toe with his dark cloak, his head buried underneath the hood. It was said that his fingers were that of a skeleton when he played his pipe, and the children had recognized the tune he played as being a bit different. Still, it was a tune they couldn’t resist, like candy on the porch of a witch’s house.

Looking at him made one miss a beat in his heart, and made the eyelids twitch. The Piper had come back as dark as it got, capable of lulling and leading people down the path of Hell with a smile on their faces. His face didn’t show, though, behind the blackness underneath his hood. He walked slowly, confidently, detached, his cloak brushing against the ground, reminding the people of Hamlin of the rats that once covered it.

As he played his tune, the Magpie fluttered on his shoulder. It added a certain contrast to the Piper’s image. For a man who once wore the colors of a rainbow, now dressed in black, the Magpie was the only thing about him that was pied. Magpies are a very smart species. In fact, they are one of the smartest birds in the world, yet predatory and vicious when hurt or betrayed. The bird definitely suited the Piper.

In the beginning, the people of Hamlin stopped whatever they were doing with open mouths and bulging eyes. Then the founders started screaming because the tune he played poisoned their souls before their ears. This new tune had them bleed from their noses and cemented their feet to the ground. It was a tune called Dance Macabre, but it was the least of their horrors that day.

They watched their children sleepwalk in front of their eyes toward the Piper, following him like the rats across the streets. They were tiptoeing, hands stretched forward like a starving man hypnotized by the smell of food. The Piper led the children like blind mice out of town, and no one knew where they were heading.

It tore their father and mother’s hearts apart that they couldn’t move to save their children, who walked with smiles on their faces toward their unknown fate.

The children of Hamlin were no different from the rats, except that they were sweet, innocent fools who hadn’t hurt or infected anyone. Their only fault was their stubborn ancestors who had betrayed the Piper and refused to pay him. How many times did the sons and daughters pay for the sins of the fathers?

One-hundred-and-thirty children were led by the Piper to a hill called Poppenberg. One-hundred-and-thirty paid the price for their parent’s sin. One-hundred-and-thirty disappeared… all but seven children that no one ever mentioned in the books of history.

On the twenty-six of July, 1284, seven children from Hamlin escaped the melody-lulling, vengeful Piper. No one really knew how. Some people claimed these children were immune to his tunes; some claimed they were deaf so the tune didn’t affect them; some said that it was prophesized; and finally some people said that it was the world’s way of creating balance. You see, life has a way of always wanting to balance good and evil, even when it usually sucks at the job. At least, it stirs a ripple of hope in the ocean of despair, telling us that there is always a tiny hole where the light shines through in a darkened room, and it’s up to us to find that hole and start carving and making it bigger until all the sunshine splays through.

And yes, it’s the Devil who’s speaking to you, because although humans annoy me, sometimes—and I have to emphasize on sometimes—few humans surprise me with their bravery and strength. I tend to avoid those; they are too strong for me.

But here is what matters most in this story: The seven Children of Hamlin were the ancestors of the famous Lost Seven.

Now, take a breath, lay back, close the book, brush your eyebrows, go check that pimple on your face in the mirror, or better get yourself a cup of coffee. Let this part sink in for a while because the ride will get bumpier when you continue reading. The world will feel like one enormous universe, only so small when you connect the dots and realize that we’re all the same story repeating itself in different forms.

Now, that your coffee tasted good—I hope it was black the way I like it most—you might ask me who the Lost Seven are. Why are they so important, and why do they keep popping up everywhere?

Believe me, it’s complicated.
Some call them the Enchanted Seven, and some call them the Seven Pilgrimms—which says a lot about who they are already; Pil
grimms
as in the Brothers
Grimm
, but I will get into that later.

What you need to know is that they are the descendants of the seven Children of Hamlin who escaped the Piper, and they were destined to have the final word on what should happen in the Kingdom of Sorrow many centuries later.

A short time after the incident of the Children of Hamlin, the Piper returned to town, looking for the seven escapees. Of course, they had already fled away with their families. The locals, founders, and the people of Hamlin refused to tell the Piper their whereabouts. They considered this their small victory against the face of evil.

The Piper was maddened. His revenge had been incomplete and meaningless. Seven children had escaped his punishment, and the Piper wasn’t going to let it pass. The seven children and their families had become his ultimate enemy. He swore he’d hunt them down, hunt their children down, and their children’s children until the end of time.

The Piper, in his rage, flapped his cloak, only once, like the wings of a bat, and the rats skittered from underneath it again, spreading the plague back into Hamlin. The plague he’d once saved them from.

This time, everyone died within days.

The Piper’s sole desire in life was to track the seven families down to complete his revenge. He traveled to London, Prague, Paris, and the rest of Europe. He didn’t take chances. If he only suspected them to be hiding in a particular town, he stood over the hill and flapped his cloak, then sat on a rock playing his demonic tune while the rats spread the deadly plague. His music had become the soundtrack of famine, the orchestration of death, and the hymns for funerals.

He had even carved two more holes in his pipe in addition to the previous five. It allowed him to play a broader range of melodies, and he thought of each hole as a grave for one of the seven.

He didn’t sleep, didn’t eat, didn’t blink an eye, chasing the seven. It didn’t matter if his plague killed many innocents on the way. He was incapable of sympathizing, and the faces of humans only reminded him of the founders of Hamlin.

He traced a woman named Bianca, Cinderella’s mother of the seven Children of Hamlin. He chased her from Venice in Italy, crossing to the island of Murano, then all the way to London. When he lost trace of her there, he didn’t hesitate one minute to send out his rats to plague the city.

Thousands of black rats swarmed the city of London and spread their disease. He stood on a hill before dusk one day, tucked his pipe in his cloak, showing his skeleton hands from under the sleeves, his eyes were the color of gold shimmering with fire inside, and then he sent his curse upon the land.

“Children of Hamlin,” the piper said as the wind swirled around him, spiraling toward the purple-blackened sky. “I will hunt you down for eternity, and you better not take your breath. I will kill you with my melodies, I am the Black Death.”

It should be needless to mention that the Black Death was one of the greatest plagues in history, killing millions of people in Europe.

Historians will mumble and jumble the cause of the Black Death stayed a mystery. Let them sing and let them dance. Historians know so little about history. Science and medicine at the time hadn’t known of what is now called the bubonic plague, a severe and deadly infection usually caused by rats who have an uncanny ability for spreading the disease. Only the Piper had the power to produce it and curse Europe for decades, looking for the seven Children of Hamlin and their descendents.

The plague was contagious and incurable. Physicians failed in finding a cure, and ended up dying from it. Houses were crossed with a red letter X indicating that the habitants were infected. They weren’t allowed to leave, and if they did, it was legal to kill them. Families were torn apart, parents left their infected children behind, and husbands abandoned their ill wives. There was no escape because the plague was death itself. Those who fled away made things worse, spreading the disease elsewhere.

The Piper stood laughing on the hills of towns and cities, flapping his black cloak, sending his black rats, accompanied by his pied Magpie, then he lit a cigar and smoked it.

“Ashes to Ashes and dust to dust,” he smirked against the spiraling wind. “The seven will die because they must.”

There were so many corpses that people couldn’t dig graves for them anymore. They settled for digging enormous holes in the ground so they could roll down the hundreds of bodies and cremate them at once.

“Say your prayer, catch your breath,” the Piper said. “Before I come, the Black Death,” he lit another cigar, watching another town ashen away.

Years later, when the plague ended, young girls used to roam the ashen streets of Europe, singing a song that described the catastrophe. It was as if someone had taught them the words to pass the truth to the generations to come.

The girls knocked on people’s houses, and if you gave them a sixpence, they tapped their feet and danced for you, singing:

Ring around the rosy;

A pocketful of posies;

Ashes, Ashes;

We all fall down.

Ring around the rosy;

A pocketful of posies;

Atishoo Atishoo

We all fall down.

Parents sang this nursery rhyme for their children, unbeknownst of what it was really about. I won’t say now who made them sing the songs, but all I can reveal is that the songs were meant to sound childish and happy so they passed undetected by those who had later forged history to their own benefits. It was a smart way to make sure the truth never died.

Ring around the rosy
was about the red circular rash that people were infected with once plagued.
A pocketful of posies
described the flowers people thought could cover the awful smell of the dead. It was also thought that the plague transmuted through breath, and that flowers helped keep it away.

Ashes, Ashes
described the hundreds of cremated bodies.
We all fall down
described the huge ditches that were dug to burry the dead.
Atishoo Atishoo
described the sneezing that preceded the illness.

The secrets and mysteries of the world’s history were sung on the tongues of the innocent children century after century.

One day, people woke up and the plague was gone. Did the Piper give up on finding the Lost Seven? It was unlikely, but his disappearance had been a mystery. Maybe he’d met his match, an equal force of goodness that had put him to sleep. The truth is that no one knew how he’d disappeared and how the plague stopped.

Historians, as deluded as they always were, claimed that so many people had died that the disease couldn’t host the living anymore. Others claimed that the rats ended up catching their own plague and died like everyone else. Historians are in many ways like scientists; most of the things they say are destined to be surpassed by someone else years later.

The Piper’s disappearance lasted about four centuries until he rose again to spread an even crueler plague in Europe in the 1600’s. It didn’t mean that all the world was free of his evil the years he had been gone. On the contrary, the Piper had left behind a darker secret: one-hundred-and-thirty children of Hamlin—one hundred and twenty three, since seven escaped.