The Pied Piper

Does cold exist?

Cold, in truth, is only a figment of our imaginations, a thought we trick out of reality. Cold does not exist, cold is only that place where heat is not.

Does darkness exist?

Darkness does not exist; darkness is the absence of light. Light we can study, but not darkness.

Evil, in turn, is the absence of goodness, the corruption of all things pure and right. Evil does not exist; it is like darkness and cold. Aslan did not create evil. Evil is only that place where he is not.

~Stormrunner, prophet of Narnia, in the year 899

There was only a hint of color in the oak that stood next the house that August and when Edmund went outside he could look up thought the branches and see the barrage balloons gamboling above the city like silver elephants on tethers. There was a feeling of excitement in the air, a cold anticipation that could be cut with a knife. To Lucy, who was only seven, it was a feeling of going away, for all her friends had been packed up and sent away to the country and she thought that perhaps it would be summer holls all over again. They lived in Chelsea, one of the many boroughs of London and though it was part of Town, they didn't consider it Town.

They thought of Peter and Susan as the elders. Peter was seventeen and terribly grown up in their eyes. He was going to go into the RAF, he declared, just as father had during the Great War.

"Will this be another Great War?" Lucy had asked.

"We all hope not," Peter had said quietly and Lucy felt that he hadn't really answered her question at all.

It was late August when Susan saw the unopened yellow envelop of the telegram lying on the kitchen table. Her father was a brain surgeon, who worked at Charing Cross and she could hear him whistling merrily to himself as he closed the front door and took off his hat and gloves.

"Hullo Susan!" he called cheerfully, looking wistfully at the kettle. Susan laughed and put it on, then turned to look at him, very seriously for her fifteen years.

"There's a telegram for you."

"Has mother read it?"

"She hasn't gotten back from Town with Lucy yet. They went to get her a new winter coat."

Her father snatched it up from the table and looked it over as if it were one of his patients. "It's from Digory."

He tore it open and his face lit.

"So, he's agreed to have you!"

"What?" Susan exclaimed.

He handed it to her as the kettle began to boil and she glanced at the message, 'Send them along.'

"This is your old friend in Lancashire?" Susan asked. "What does he mean, 'send them along'?"

"Exactly what it says," her father said, "Sorry old girl. Your mother and I just don't feel right about keeping you. If there is a war, London will be bombed. You and Peter and Lucy and Edmund are all going up north to stay with Digory."

"Oh," Susan said softly. She had been expecting it… she really had. "Aren't we a bit old? I can see Edmund and Lucy going, but not us two older ones."

"You are, technically," Father said, swigging his tea, "I'm a little worried about Peter, really. He's set on joining up as soon as he's old enough and I thought that if we sent him up there- and it's a beautiful place- he might forget about it for a bit."

"I don't think that's terribly likely," Susan said with a sad smile. "You know what he's like."

"Yes, we all know what he's like."

The front door slammed and a cap went spinning up onto the hat stand.

"What who's like?" Peter asked good-naturedly, glancing over his shoulder.

Susan rolled her eyes.

"There's one other thing," father continued as Peter stared down the spout of the kettle, then proceeded to fill it with more water. "Aunt Alberta wrote asking us if she could send Eustace along with you."

"Eustace!" Susan exclaimed.

"She's afraid he'll be bullied if he goes to people he doesn't know," father said. "So you'll just have to deal with it."

"Deal with what?" Peter asked, reaching down a can of shortbread biscuits from a high cupboard. "What's going on, anyway?"

~o*o~

Glenridding was a beautiful place.

Every inch of it seemed to be farmland, fields of wheat and hay; miles of it. They saw a teams of great draft horses and lines of stone walls and hedges running almost aimlessly up the valley, or seeming the race the train next to the tracks. The cows were chewing their cud and they locked eyes for a moment with the children as the train rushed by.

As they stood on the platform, the shadows were growing longer and the sun was low in the sky and off in the distance, they could just see the sparkle of the sun off Ullswater, the long lake in the west.

The mist was hanging in the valley and the hills were plummeting into the lake, where vibrant green was reflected, clinging to the ribs of rock that rose from the earth. Purple heather grew up the valley, blooming in spring and dark in summer, the great wind rushing down like a fury to touch the face of the lake.

"If we were higher up, we could see the mountains of Scotland," Peter had explained, because he had been soaking in a map of the area during their journey. "And if we all turned into birds and flew due west, we would see the Isle of Man."

"Not likely, eh?" Edmund had commented, good-naturedly shoving Eustace.

"What?"

"Turning into birds."

"I don't know what you're talking about."

Eustace was a sallow, thin, puny little fellow who looked as if he were perpetually sucking on a lemon. They had tried to include him, but when he refused to be included they resorted to leaving him along.

"He's a little strange," Peter had commented after he'd offered to teach Eustace how to whittle and had been flatly turned down.

"I think he was born that way." Edmund said.

They piled their suitcases and gas masks on a nearby bench and stood, watching a distant speck of sail beating across the lake. A tall maple to their right was just beginning to be singed by the cold weather. Winter was coming. Susan turned to button Lucy's new red coat higher about her neck.

"What's he like?" Lucy asked suddenly.

"Who?" Edmund wondered.

"Mr. Kirke."

"Haven't the faintest," Peter said. "I'll I know is that he flew with father in the Great War and he's a professor at Oxford."

They all started at the sound of a backfiring engine.

An old, battered lorry leaped around the corner. Edmund, who was the automobile connoisseur, had difficultly placing the year and make. Susan was vaguely wondering if it had ever been a definite color. Peter speculated on how tires so bald managed to have any traction.

The lorry screeched to a halt, the breaks whining like tortured ghosts.

A man leaned out of the window, or wind hole, rather, for the glass had long since disappeared. Or perhaps, Edmund speculated, it never was.

"Hello!" the man said, he had dark hair, graying now and a ruddy face, very odd, but very memorable. "I'm Digory Kirke, You Edward's kids?"

"We are," Peter said stepping forward, "I'm Peter, sir."

"Are you?" Mr. Kirke's gaze settled on Peter. "I met you a long time ago. Remember?"

"I'm sorry, I don't," Peter said.

"Well, you were pretty little," Mr. Kirke said with a smile; he turned to Susan with an inquiring eyebrow.

"Susan, sir," Susan said smartly.

"I'm Lucy!" Lucy exclaimed, "I'm very glad to be here!"

"I'm delighted to hear that," Mr. Kirke said, smiling. He turned his gaze on Edmund.

"Edmund, sir," Edmund broke into a shy smile.

Mr. Kirke turned to look at Eustace, but Eustace was pretending to look the other way.

"Well, I suppose one of you doesn't belong to a name, very unfortunate, but…" he looked back at the rest of them, "Welcome anyway."

"We really are glad to be here," Susan said, "and we'd like to thank you for being so kind. Mother and father send their best."

"My pleasure!" Mr. Kirke said, "Most of you seem very delightful. There seem to be quite a lot of you; I suppose it didn't occur to me how many five really is. Ah well. All luggage and boys in the back, girls in the front."

"I'm not going to ride in the back!" Eustace exclaimed. "It's not safe!"

"You could run along behind," Edmund suggested, pitching a suitcase into the bed.

"I'll ride in the back!" Susan said quickly, then stepped closer to the Professor. "He hasn't been feeling well."

"He never feels well," Edmund muttered, but no one heard him.

"Well then, he can be a gentleman for once," Mr. Kirke said decisively. "Hop in the front, my dear."

~o*o~

It's a beautiful place, the Lakes district. There is a magical, mysterious quality about it, there at the edge of Scotland not far from where Hadrian's Wall snakes over the hills. The people consider themselves highlanders, but the real highlanders, those hard-bitten, hot-blooded people of the utter north only scoff at them.

The travelers in the lorry commanded the finest view; they could see the breathtaking green and gold of the hills without anything in the way. I won't say the journey wasn't hazardous, for the lorry had an uncanny knack of behaving like a wild thing, bucking and rearing like a stallion. But it gave Peter, a free, daredevilish sort of feeling and Edmund couldn't help laughing as he hung on for dear life.

Eustace was silent and they thought he was brooding, but he really wasn't. Eustace had one secret that he had never told anyone, not even his mother, who was his closest confidant. He wanted to be a naturalist.

Susan thought him a little bully with a horrid fixation on dead things and the insides of dead things. Whenever the Pevensies had gone to visit their Aunt and Uncle in Oxford, his room had smelled of formaldehyde and rubbing alcohol. There were dead butterflies and insects pinned to cards on the walls and swollen bull frogs and crawfish floating in large jars, waiting to be dissected. He was smart; they had to admit that when they looked at his chemical set and watched as he blew things up.

He liked to hear Lucy scream, but more than that, he loved nature. He felt out of place everywhere except when he was outside with a magnifying glass, looking at the clear green cells in a birch leaf, or hiding behind a rock to photograph a deer with his Zeiss Ikon. No one knew about that side of him and he never told. He didn't trust his cousins and they didn't trust him.

"It's a big place," Mr. Kirke said over the roar of the engine. "A very large place. Don't get lost in."

Susan nodded, staring out the window at the sweeping countryside.

"Do you have any children?" Lucy wanted to know.

"No, unfortunately," Mr. Kirke replied, "I'm an old bachelor, didn't you know?"

"Oh…I'm sorry," Lucy said, not quite sure what to say. That was the proper thing to say to someone who'd lost a child, not someone who'd lost a child that never existed.

After about fifteen minutes, they arrived.

The land had changed; tall oaks grew at regular intervals then they turned onto a private drive and as they rounded a curve they saw the house as the trees slowly fell away.

It was a grand house...and old. So old, Edmund wondered if had once been a monastery and Lucy asked if it was haunted.

"Haunted?" Mr. Kirke asked. "No, it's not haunted; not by your general kind of ghost, at any rate...but there are different sorts of ghosts."

Lucy shivered as the lorry roared up to the front door, bucked around in a circle and came to a squealing halt.

"Well," Professor Kirke said as the engine stalled with a whine. "Here we are."

~o*o~

The entrance hall took what was left of their breath away...it was Tudor, the walls carved with reliefs, the banisters intricately worked with different kinds of spindles. A mounted tiger snarled at them, Zulu war shields hung on the wall, fashioned of black and white cow hide stretched over a wooden frame.

A stiff woman stood waiting for them, flashing them a stiff smile as they put down their trunks in a pile on the floor.

"This is Mrs. Macready, my house keeper," Professor Kirke explained. "She'll bring you up to your rooms. I'll see you at dinner."

He dismissed them then with a wave of his hand and disappeared down a long corridor. They watched him go, then turned back to Mrs. Macready.

"Come with me, then."

They followed her up the great staircase and saw a huge medieval tapestry hung on the landing, displaying lords and ladies going hunting on massive chargers. She showed them into their rooms and at last, pushed open a door at the end of the corridor.

"This will be your sitting room," she said. "I hope you will be comfortable in it."

They took stock of the piano in the corner and the suit of armor standing guard over a potted palm tree. There was a marble fireplace and books… one wall was covered with them…there was a large wardrobe in the corner.

"I'm sure we will, ma'am, thank you," Peter said.

"Well, I'll be leaving you then," she said. "I'm sure you'll want to freshen up before dinner. It will be served at half past six. A maid will call you."

"Thank you," Susan said as the house keeper left, closing the door after her.

"I think we're here," Edmund commented.

The others rolled their eyes.

"Look at the wardrobe." Lucy said.

It was in the corner; a tall, dark wardrobe, gleaming and beautiful. In the grain of the wood were beautiful and intricate carvings, strangely lifelike and fantastical all at once. There was a tall graceful apple tree with a strange sort of bird in the topmost branches and at the base of the tree, looking up at the crown was a boy in knickerbockers. The knob of the wardrobe had a lion's head engraved on it.

"It reminds me of father's work," Peter said quietly, reaching out to trace the line of a tree branch.

"Apple wood, I'd say." Edmund commented.

"You think so?" Peter asked, glancing at him.

"Mmmm."

"Let's get ready for dinner," Susan interrupted. She knew they'd start talking about woodworking for hours if she only let them.

"Yes, mother," Peter said meekly.

Author's Note:

This story is more or less a condensation of the first stories we posted on this site the year before last. They were, unimaginatively enough, The Wardrobe, The Witch and The Lion. I wrote the majority of them when I was twelve and thirteen and as I grew older, I was gradually more disgusted with the work of my former self. We meant to deliver a message, but lost it in a web of unnecessary trails.

I resolved, therefore, to rework my original plan. I have deleted more than two thirds of the story and rewritten large tracts. I hope that in simplifying it, we will deliver, more directly what we originally intended.

We offer thanks to our old reviewers, mostly anonymous, who put up with my rough writing and long-sufferingly offered support and suggestions. This is for you.

~Rose and Psyche

Disclaimer:

The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe is under entirely new management. Rose and Psyche have found it necessary to fire several of the old employees and replace them with new ones, the Beavers were caught chewing on chair legs, but have been allowed to return with a caution. Who ever wrote the plot has been sacked. So far we are getting on swimmingly.

Next Up:

Chapter Two, in which Susan comforts Peter, Eustace is indignant and Lucy asks Edmund to tell her a story.