The Piper

The Piper - By Lynn Hightower




ONE




They call us, you know, the dead do. The ones we’ve loved, the ones who’ve passed. Someone you know has received a call – maybe it was you. They call to tell us they love us, to tell us they’re okay. And sometimes they call us to warn.

For Olivia James, the phone call came through on the last night that she and her daughter, Teddy, spent in the California house. Olivia’s brother, Christopher James, had been dead for just nine weeks. Olivia immediately recognized his voice.

The radio alarm had been set for seven a.m., but it went off just after midnight, at 12.12 precisely, waking Olivia with a song she had not heard since she was a little girl – ‘Heart and Soul’, that old romantic standby from the nineteen forties. Like every other child in America, Olivia had played the song on the piano as a duet, sometimes with her brother, Chris, but most often with her big sister, Emily, before Emily disappeared. Twenty-five years ago, when Olivia was only five. Six years later her mother died, from what Olivia always secretly thought was a broken heart. Both parents were dead now. It had just been Olivia and Chris, for the last ten years, expanding their little circle to spouses and kids of their own. Olivia and Chris and the ever present hope that someday their sister Emily would miraculously return.

Heart and soul, I fell in love with you –

Heart and soul, I fell in love with you –

Baaaabyyyy . . .

Olivia’s cell rang on baby. The land line had been cut for months.

Olivia was immediately awake. She was a bad sleeper, particularly these last few months, when the money worries had been extreme. She heard static, and rubbed her forehead, then frowned over the distinct echo of chimes. Wind chimes, she thought. The voice, so familiar, so longed-for, brought her sitting up and trembling in her bed.

‘Livie? Do you know who this is?’

It sounded like her brother. But it couldn’t be her brother. Her brother was dead. The death verdict had been bizarre. SUNDS. Sudden Unexplained Nocturnal Death Syndrome. A rare, mysterious death that worked like an adult form of SIDS. People died in their sleep and no one knew why.

‘Chris? Is it really you?’ Olivia gripped the phone so hard her fingers ached. As if she could squeeze her brother out.

‘I tried to hang on, Kidlet. But it just wasn’t meant to be.’

The voice was her brother’s, but different somehow, in a way Olivia could not quite figure out. But only her brother called her Kidlet. Her brother who was dead but talking to her on the phone.

‘Chris, if it really is you, somehow, I love you, okay? I miss you.’

Static again, and Olivia got out of bed, pacing toward the front window, the connection was always better there.

‘—sten to me, Livie, I don’t have . . . ong.’

‘Chris?’

The silence came like a vacuum, the voice gone. Olivia dodged the boxes that were stacked to the ceiling. The movers had taken ten long hours to get everything packed up, and were due in the morning first thing to load. She pinched one of the slats of the blinds and looked outside. The For Sale sign in front of her house was slightly twisted. There were lights in her neighbors’ houses, and the blue of television screens glowed in every house in the cul de sac, though everyone was sealed up tight. Californians lived behind closed doors and did not hang out on porches, like Olivia remembered from Tennessee.

She saw the glow of a cigarette, and a woman in a dark tee shirt, walking her tiny dog. The woman lived three houses over, usually wore sandals with rhinestones, and she always turned away when Olivia said hello. Olivia made a point of saying hi whenever she saw the woman, in the way of southerners who use courtesy to mess with people under the cover of being polite. People who did not grow up in the south never understood they’d been insulted on the sly. Olivia had learned early that you could say any nasty thing that came to mind so long as you preceded it with bless your heart, and said it with a smile. Teddy’s father, Hugh, called it her southern bullshit.

Olivia’s throat was tight enough that swallowing hurt. She had just decided the call was nothing more than a dream when she heard the chimes again, and a crackle, as if a lost connection had been restored.

‘. . . warn you, Livie.’

‘Warn me about what? Chris? Warn me about what?’

‘I had to pay the piper. You have to know it’s been taken care of.’

‘I don’t understand. What’s been taken care of?’

‘. . . my fault. Don’t let him . . . after you.’

‘Who’s coming after me?’

‘The Mister Man.’ Static again. ‘. . . ove you, Livie . . .’

‘Chris?’

Silence like forever in her heart.

The Mister Man.

Olivia stumbled across the hall, dodging the boxed up pictures that were stacked next to the wall outside the bathroom. She peered into Teddy’s room, heart beating hard until comforted by the visible curl of her little girl, sleeping on the wrong side as usual, head at the foot of the bed, wrapped in the pink chenille bedspread. Olivia and Teddy had their peculiar habits of sleep, Teddy wrong side up, and Olivia always on top of the bedspread, because she hated the slippery sensation of sheets.

Winston, the golden retriever, lifted his head and groaned because his bones ached, but dutifully padded out to the hallway to nuzzle Olivia’s knee.

Olivia and Winston settled side by side at the top of the steep stairway, Winston with his muzzle in Olivia’s lap, smelling like old dog and comfort.

The Mister Man. Sibling code for the nameless, faceless unknown that made Emily disappear. Olivia knew that it was her imagination, but ever since her sister went away, Olivia had often felt the ongoing, unsettling sensation that she was being watched.

He is three million, eight hundred years old and counting. He is six hundred sixty years since renewed. In the flesh, he leaves the footprint of the goat, though he can leave the footprint of the man, if he chooses.

Tonight he walks behind the woman with rhinestone slippers, watching with his lazy yellow sated lion eyes. Her tiny little dog looks anxiously over its shoulder, but the Piper’s business, his hunger, is not for the woman or this miniature guardian. The little dog strains the leash, hard enough for its tiny heart to burst, how delicious, yet the woman only frowns, no appreciation at all, too busy talking on the cell phone to her married lover. The Piper turns his connoisseur’s nose up at the reek of her, ennui on the hoof, no thank you – too easy, too tainted, too dry.

It is the face he sees at the window that rouses him. Heart shaped and full, those fleshy pink lips, flower petal soft, the thick hair a man could wrap round his hand to pin her down, the juicy rounded body, contours where he could sink his teeth and chew. This one stirs his loins, and sings like an ache of exquisite pain in his blood. He tastes her, shudders at the strength of her yearning, though she hardly seems to know, truly, what it is she wants, only thinking of it as home, the hungry grief for the ones she has lost. Now hunger – that is one thing the Piper understands. And when they fall away into the dark, as some of them always do, the Piper is there to catch them. One more into the fold.

But he yearns most particularly for the special ones, craving the warmth and throb of their light, wrapping himself around it tighter and tighter until he chokes it off for good.

The Piper looks up at the window and smiles. She does not see him, oh no, she will not see him unless – until, dare he say it – she chooses that he be seen. The very best games have rules. But she can’t keep him from stalking, and she is sensing him, smelling him, he prickles now on the back of her neck. He knows her sweet spot, her little Teddy. The Piper can always taste the salty red meat of their hearts.

He howls with pleasure, has watched her such a long time, licking at her heels, and he is after her now, like a dog digging up an old buried bone, but then he stops. He listens.

A scent, perhaps? Merely instinct?

Something makes him hesitate, stops him mid stride, chokes off the flow of pleasurable pain. He hears it very faintly, the voice that calls his name – not Decan Ludde, not Duncan Lee, the Piper has so many names, and he loves them all, like little treasures. This is the old name that knows him, that puts him in his place, and he feels the nasty anger that burns. He does not like being distracted from his pleasures, but he is a wise old hunter and he knows when to put the pretties aside and concentrate on the smells.

Nothing he can see yet, just the feeling, which is knowledge enough. She will not be easy prey, this one, she is not alone. They never are alone, if only they knew it. And how little they do know, how innocent and simple their delusions. It makes them that much more delicious to hunt.

He looks back up at the window. She is no longer there, but he feels her. Olivia. He knows her name and she’ll soon learn his.

Next time he will leave her a calling card. A tiny pool of water, no bigger than your average blood stain, maybe by the bed. He likes water, it makes him strong, it travels, and he drowns them like rats in the water.

Let me in, little girlies, let me in.

This is how it begins. Again.