[ IP ] 'Come Little Children '

Our man felt ill fit in the local dress, starched shirt and hat like a privy bucket - ill fit to the local roads as well, his feet built for simpler step and easier grade than unwrought cobbles wrapped in thistle and the fallen leaves of the season. In truth not the least portion of the day was to his liking. Not the chill of the wind nor the nasty close clouds that were little more than high-thinking fog, nor the route he took - neither the one he took now nor the one that had led him here. 
 
 Still, they had paid in advance, they in the town, their worry dressing their faces and watching from windows and killing any chance for guile or scheming from their end of the deal. They gave him fifty billfolds, the town axe, and their old incapable lord's lease on his dead brother's estate six counties over. No pick of the town girls, but then most had followed the beast out to begin with - all except the blind and deaf and crippled, all moaning at missing out on the fun. 
 
 Our man pulled that starched collar closer to his neck and felt the axe scrape his leg inside the train of his duster. His hat was also a helm, and his jacket layered with taught seacow leather, the kind that no arrow nor talon might pierce. His manner was his own, jaunty and quick against the weather, and betraying an armor in his quickness. 
 
 A branch of road hidden behind rushes offered a distant fire, its glow shining out from the midst of the gathered hay. Our man put axe to hand and set to see the monster's affairs. Here on the path were the footprints of youth in numbers, little children and their elder siblings alike, all the town's helpless and those who knew better. 
 
 He found them arrayed about a fire, singing some old song of their fathers' fathers, and in the midst of them the beast himself, orange-skinned head only a shade or two lighter than the lanternlight that stood for his eyes and mouth. Our man paused beside a tree to watch their doings. 
 
 They in the town had called this a ghost, a pumpkin for a face and dressed in the harvest hay, one that had haunted their streets of nights bringing nuisance and frightful notions to their doors. He called to the children, they said - sweet promises and offers of excitement and games. None could refuse - though he spoke to the town at large, it was as though he spoke to each of the children personally. 
 
 Now they had already gutted one unfortunate and put him up on a pike at the monster's bidding, his entrails hanging low and browning in the fire like sausage, his face glazed over with the dull surprise of death. A girl in her teens, similar enough to be perhaps the boy's cousin, had his cap and coat on for her only clothes, his blood smeared over her breasts and the knive that had ended him between her teeth. She was laughing like she'd played a trick on him - and she had. 
 
 Our man kept to the hay for cover as he watched the procession, nursery songs narrating the vivisection of the weak and helpless, the least of them brought to their knees and opened, the next least holding them down with glee that blinded them against seeing it would be their turn next. Against the wall of the harvest, the eldest boys stood in quiet approval, war paint and fresh scars for jewelry, their eyes on the girls they might pull aside for a turn when the scene was done. 
 
 But our man tired of the tableau, and only tired more when the monster spoke from its flaming mouth - `` NO GREATER FOLLY, CHILDREN! NO GREATER FOLLY THAN TO THINK THE HARVEST IS ONLY FOR GRAINS AND CROPS!'' The children assented and looked amongst the wounded to decide who would next ride the pike, their hymnal crib-song not ceasing. 
 
 Our man moved among the outermost of them, holding the axe at the juncture of blade and pole. As the surge chose a girl of six for its next object, he met the far end of the inner circle, at the back of the beast, the eyes slowly turning to him and the songs beginning to quiet. 
 
 The beast kept its pitch - `` SONG! SONG FOR THE HARVEST, CHILDREN! WE MUST BE MERRY! WE MUST-'' As it turned, it met our man's eyes, its own too jagged and harsh to do more than approximate surprise - `` YOU! WHAT ARE YOU DOING-'' 
 
 Our man took his hat off calm as stepping inside a tavern and spun it up onto the monster's pumpkin head, those charcoal pupils following the arc of the brim, distracted - and long enough to miss the axe as it took the first of the beast's legs just above the knee, thigh and hip buckling and tearing away in a burst of straw, the children gasping, the beast screaming as it fell, waving frenzied hands in defense, carving a scar across our man's coat, stumbling him, tearing the hat to shreds in rage. 
 
 Our man cycled the creature, looking for the angle where he might make the killing blow. This kill was no simple one - it writhed and shrieked and lashed at anything it thought too near. A boy on the rim of the fire who stood too long found himself without a throat from one of the beast's glancing spasms, and fell atop it dead at once, slowing its frenzy long enough for our man to take its arms, one by one, and calmly toss them to the fire, where they lit and burst in a fashion no normal straw might do. 
 
 And now our man could see the beast for what it was, and laugh at just how those in the town could credit this lowly thing the majesty of ghosts. To a trained eye - and our man had a very trained eye - the creature's jagged features were just too sinister, too perfectly frightening to be the product of natural magic. And the craftwork of its limbs and body, straw built around no wooden frame - this could be no scarecrow from any field of this county, not one any spirit worth its mist would possess at least. 
 
 Most telling was the character burnt into the underside of the monster's head, into the outer skin of the pumpkin, a twist of garden snakes against a tremorous field of what were supposed to be flowers - this was a mark from a ring, planted by the beast's enchanter to animate it. Anyone of knowledge could see this was a beast built to purpose, and by master's hands. 
 
 That made it much simpler for our man to put the axe through its face - pumpkin guts sprayed the assembled, seeds spilling out and sparking in the fire under the sizzling entrails. The smell of rot and smoke filled the patch, and woke the children to their place and circumstance. The girl-cousin of the dead boy pulled the jacket closer around her, figurehead of the embarrassment that crept now through the children, slight apologetic glances between would-be killers and their would-be victims. 
 
 Our man spoke - `` If you think I'm here to chastise you for following this fellow out here, rest yourselves. I do n't blame you for your curiosity. Perhaps you drove it too far when you put your friend here up on a spit to roast, but that's for preachers and moralists to decide, and I'm neither.'' 
 
 `` Who are you, then?'' the girl in the coat said. 
 
 `` Your parents have paid me to take you home. Not much, but enough to convince me I might slay the beast that took you - and look at him now. Would you say he was more majestic before I put the axe to him, or after?'' 
 
 When no one answered that, he spoke again - `` That was a joke, kids. Regardless, we should get going, before night turns full and we all get lost all over again. Just keep behind me.'' 
 
 The children made a rough line behind our man, set in uneven rows, some color coming back to their faces. When some moved to bring the sacrifice down, our man stopped them - `` Do n't bother. His parents wo n't want to see him like that. Better to say the monster ate him and leave it there.'' 
 
 The girl pouted, angry at herself - `` My parents wo n't want to see me like this, either. I've made myself shameful tonight.'' 
 
 `` Ah, do n't fret over it,'' our man said, letting his eyes roam over the girl - `` I know for certain they'll never think ill thoughts of you again. You keep close to me and I'll be sure you're treated right.'' 
 
 Through the wooded path our man led his wards back to the road, the dark of night creeping over them fully now, the wind slowing without a bright sky to vigor it. The way of the path, up or down, was locked to all by the creep of night. 
 
 Our man called to the children - `` Kids, listen up! The way back is dark, so you'll want to keep very close behind me! Just listen for me as I walk, and I'll lead you the right way.'' And to prove his point, he pulled from the folds of his jacket a flute, long and slender, and before he began to play it he removed, for his convenience, the ring he wore about his finger, the one with a set of twined garden snakes in a field of flowers. 
 
 He played the same tune he'd heard the children singing as he walked them, eager and happy all of them again, up the path, the wrong way, away from the town of Hamelin, where - to the last of them - they were never seen again.
