Peter & Max - Bill Willingham [87]
Dear Carl,
I’ve gone to find this world of sanctuary of which we’ve heard so many whispered tales. I was skeptical before, but I have to believe now that it exists, because my lovely new wife and I find ourselves in need of it. Feel free to follow, if ever your spirit grows restless, or the thieving life gets too boring or dangerous. Give my best to all of my former brothers and to your dear brother-in-law, our king. He turned out to be a good and honest one, which seems an odd thing to say about so accomplished a criminal.
Your eternal friend,
Peter
In which the rats come
home to roost.
OUTFITTED WITH HALF A DOZEN HIDDEN daggers, and at least twenty other concealed implements of murder, carrying Frost in its hard plastic case, Peter entered Hamelin’s Altstadt, the old town, and almost left the modern mundy city behind.
Almost.
The cobbled streets were similar to the medieval town of his youth, and many of the oldest of the old buildings, constructed in the over-ornamented Weser Renaissance style, looked vaguely familiar, if somewhat smaller than he remembered. But no matter how deep into the past he’d seemed to regress, at any time, all he had to do was to look up and see the sky punctured on all sides by a small forest of massive steel construction cranes, completely surrounding the old town section, busy adding new towers of chrome-tinted glass and brushed steel to the greater metropolitan skyline.
And of course this version of Hamelin, even in the old section, was much too clean to truly reflect the Hamelin of his past, or any medieval era town for that matter. These cobblestone streets were swept. There weren’t corpses set out into the thoroughfare to be removed. There were no piles of human waste and discarded refuse rotting in every alleyway, which in turn meant that there weren’t the attendant clouds of gnats, fleas and flies everywhere, or the ubiquitous rats. In the lost Hesse’s version of Hamelin, even after the Pied Piper’s miracles, the rats eventually returned, though the stolen children never did.
Granted, there were plenty of rats to be found here, but they were artificial. The good people of mundy Hamelin seemed to have embraced the rat as a beloved symbol of its history and heritage. One of the bridges spanning the Weser River had a huge, gold-plated statue of a rat mounted at the apex of its overhead suspension superstructure, standing astride the two center tower supports like a vermin colossus. One of the local ice cream shops (where one can purchase ice cream dishes formed into the convincing likenesses of various popular restaurant entrées, such as steak and potatoes, or spaghetti and meatballs) had a brightly painted plastic statue outside of its main entrance, depicting a giant ice cream cone of many flavors, which had somehow spilled into the shape of cyclopean rat. There were little, plastic wind-up rats, plush stuffed rats, and articulated wooden rats in the windows of every one of the numerous toy stores. Carven stone rats decorated every fountain and building cornice, and painted rats were included in the composition of every bit of commercial signage. Children could ride spring-mounted rocking-horse rats in tiny play parks, scattered liberally throughout the town, or the larger, plastic green, pink, or purple galloping rats in the Market Square’s gigantic motorized carousel. After a battle that lasted centuries, the rats had finally conquered Hamelin town, much to the approval of its citizens.
At this early hour, Peter nearly had the town to himself. Only a few deliverymen, hand-carting crates and boxes from their large panel trucks, were also up with the dawn. They were busy restocking the many shops and restaurants, helping Hamelin make its final preparations for the first of its big festival days, which would begin as soon as the town could rouse itself from its nightly slumbers.
Peter walked towards the center of town to the open market square, where a hundred bright tents, in every color of the spectrum, had been erected to shelter the visiting