Woodstickin' 2016!
(August 20, 2016)
11: All in a Row
Ariel had risen from her stool and had come down the short stair at the left side of the stage, without breaking the alluring, sinuous tune she played on the flute—not even for a breath. How does she do that? Dipper wondered—but that thought was only one of dozens, each fighting for attention. The tall, slender girl paused close to the bottom step and swayed as she played, moon-silvered, her silken dress rippling, her hair almost glowing. She looked ethereal, not like a ghost—more like an angel, Dipper thought.
Wendy still held his hand, fortunately for them both. Concentrate, Dipper! Wendy thought to him. Don't know about you, but it's getting to me. This music is really wanting to make me run away!
—And it's trying to make me all sleepy and just want to follow her wherever she goes! Look, there's Mabel and Teek, to the right. Let's see if we can push through to them.
Dipper's twin and her boyfriend, like the others, were shuffling along in a tight-packed group. They had separated—Mabel was three or four people away from Teek, and they didn't seem to notice each other, something that told Dipper things had gone bad very fast and very definitely. The crowd between Mabel and the two of them was impossible to shove through.
The shuffling, enraptured teens all around them didn't consciously try to keep Dipper and Wendy from getting to Mabel, but it was as if all the teens simply were not aware of anyone else—each one might have been the only follower of the flutist. Dipper didn't know many of them—he thought he might have glimpsed Gorney once, the kid who'd been swallowed by the Summerween Trickster, now about thirteen.
As Wendy and Dipper struggled toward Mabel, Dipper led the way, elbowing and shouldering wedges between people, something he ordinarily would never have done. He didn't pause to apologize, because nobody objected or even seemed to notice him and Wendy. It was a struggle, but he led Wendy through the press until at last he grabbed Mabel's sleeve. "Sis!"
Mabel didn't even look at him. Her eyes had the same wide-pupil, blank look she'd had that time she overdosed on Smile Dip. She smiled vacantly, her head gently bobbing, but would not even so much as glance at Dipper—her gaze was locked on Ariel, who now stood on the bottom step as maybe a hundred and fifty teens moved from the seating areas and the hillside and clustered around her.
Mabel's hypnotized or something, Dip! Wendy thought to him.
—So's everybody else! What do we do?
Dunno! If we could get to Ariel, maybe we could, like, take the flute away from her? But there's a real crush right around her, worse than this. Man, I'm getting' so itchy to leave! I think everybody eighteen or over's left already.
—It's the opposite with me. I want to get close to her and go wherever she goes. I guess together you and I balance out. Just hold on! We can get through this, but only together!
Dip, we have to find out what's going on. What do you know about the Pied Piper?
—Just the legend. The town of Hamelin is somewhere in Germany. Back in the Middle Ages, I think in the 1200s, they had a plague of rats, a mysterious sorcerer who dressed in multicolored clothes—pied, they called that—and who claimed he had magic fife or flute showed up and made a bargain to exterminate the rats. The mayor promised him a thousand guilders or something, payment in gold coins, anyway, and then when the piper began playing, all the rats everywhere ran out into the streets and followed him as he marched along. He led hem out of the town and then he waded into a river, and they all followed him and drowned. But then the mayor reneged on the deal and refused to give him the reward he'd been promised. The piper warned the people of Hamelin that they'd pay in a different way on some specific day, I think a saint's day in June. Then he went away but came back on that day, this time dressed in green like a hunter, and this time when he played, all the children of the town followed him. He led them away somewhere. A lot of the stories say he led them to a hill that split in two, and they all went into the gap, and then the hill closed again.
Pretty much what I remember, too.
—I read somewhere that there used to be an really old stained-glass window in a church in Hamelin showing the piper and the kids. And in the chronicles of the town, some clerk wrote something like "A hundred years ago today all of our children left." Something real must have happened. People have suggested that the piper was a symbol of the plague or the Children's Crusade or just the Grim Reaper, not a young rat-catcher.
I think the piper in the legend was a young dude. This piper's a girl, I'm pretty sure.
—Yeah she—Wait, what's she doing now?
Wendy didn't have to answer—Ariel had stepped off onto the ground and the packed mob opened a path for her as she came slowly to the front of the stage, turned, and walked with calm deliberation toward the exit gate, and the whole crowd of teens closed ranks again and followed her.
Come on! Wendy led Dipper up the steps and onto the now-empty stage, bright in the glare of the spotlights, and they ran across to the other side, then leaped hand in hand down to the ground. It almost worked—they had come close to heading Ariel off, but she had made a turn away from the stage, and the mesmerized teens crowded close around her again. Dipper and Wendy managed to get on the left fringe of the group, though, maybe thirty feet behind Ariel. They had closed some of the distance, anyway.
Ford pushed the barrel of Stan's quantum destabilizer down. "Don't shoot, Stanley! That could be extraordinarily dangerous!"
"But it's a freakin' UFO!" Stan said.
Ford nodded. "It has that appearance! And it may also have weapons of its own that we can't even begin to understand!"
Indeed, the thing they saw ahead did look like the classic image of a UFO—a saucer-shaped disk probably a hundred feet across, thin at the edge, bulging into a thirty-foot-tall dome in the center, with a similar bulge beneath, roughly like a somewhat flattened version of Saturn. From the side closest to them, a narrow unrailed ramp led from the edge of the craft, if it was a craft, down to the grass. Other than that and three jointed legs that supported it about thirty-five feet off the ground, like a huge tripod, they could see no features, not a light, not a porthole, not a hatch. The whole thing gleamed a dull silver, like polished pewter, glowing with its own soft light.
"What are we supposed to do, then, Ford?" Stan demanded. "Tie a white hankie to a stick and walk up wavin' it? I saw that movie! It did not end well!"
Ford had taken out a small anomaly detector and was scanning the thing. "I'm not picking up any EM emissions at all. It doesn't seem to be communicating in any way, unless it has some method that we don't' understand. Let's approach cautiously."
They took slow step after slow step through the tall, dewy, tangled grass. Stan whispered, "Look, Sixer! The grass right underneath it has been all swirled flat!"
It was just possible to see the compressed grass in the faint glow of the craft. The long stalks looked not only flattened, but almost braided. "Like a crop circle," Ford agreed. "Stop and let me try something." With his left hand he raised a pocket flashlight and began to blink it at the object.
"What are you doin'?" Stan asked.
"I'm trying Morse code."
Stan elbowed him. "Come on, Poindexter! These are aliens we're talkin' about—they probably never heard of Robert Morse!"
Sounding preoccupied, Ford murmured, "You mean Samuel F. B. Morse. He was the inventor. Robert Morse is an actor. He was in the TV movie that I watched with Lorena, Tru."
"How should I know if it's true?" Stan growled. "All I know is that if it's aliens, we gotta fight 'em off!"
"Not necessarily. They may not be hostile, and they may not be aliens," Ford said absently. Receiving no response to his blinking signals, he switched to another pattern. "Let me try a simple number sequence, one to ten and then back to one."
"Yeah, you do that. If it answers, I'm shootin'," Stan snapped. "And what do you mean, they may not be aliens?"
"Oh, they could be travelers from another dimension," Ford murmured. "Or time travelers from our own future, or from the Earth's past."
"From the past? It was all like covered wagons and clipper ships back then! Those guys didn't have electricity or flushing toilets, Ford, let alone flyin' saucers!"
Ford shook his head. "You're thinking in a limited way. The dinosaurs were on earth for a vast stretch of time, a hundred and fifty times longer than humans have even existed. What if a group of them became intelligent and built cities, developed technology? The sixty-five million years that have passed since their extinction would have erased all signs of that."
"Ya mean a door in that thing might open and T-Rexes might come chargin' out?" Stan asked. He was covering the vessel with his destabilizer rifle again.
"No response," Ford said, replacing his flashlight and his anomaly detector in the pockets of his long coat. He took out his phone and with surprising dexterity—but then he did have twelve fingers—he began texting.
"What are you doin'?" Stan asked, his voice rising in nervous exasperation. "Invitin' 'em to a tea party?"
"No, just sending an abbreviated coded report to the Agency," Ford said. "And calling in the cavalry. We might need them."
Damn, man! We get so close and then the others block us! Dipper could feel Wendy's edginess and frustration.
—I think she's leading them all the way down the alley and past the VIP lot. If she doesn't turn, it widens out there and there's nothing but the field down to the creek. We may be able to reach her then if we hustle.
She's gonna notice us. Everybody else is shuffling.
—Maybe not. As we get away from the stage, it's getting darker. Plus, I don't think she can stop playing the flute. If the music doesn't influence us, we should be OK. That means we have to—
I know, Dip. We gotta hang on and make each other stronger. Just hang on!
It took them about five minutes to clear the alleyway between the kiosks and displays of Merchants' Row and the chain-link fence beside the parking area. And then, as Dipper had predicted, the narrow column of kids ahead of them spilled out into the grassy field. Just as he and Wendy stepped up onto the low berm that was the barrier between fairgrounds and field, Dipper caught a momentary glimpse of something off the right and a couple of hundred yards away, down by the line of pine trees that bordered a creek.
—Huh!
Yeah, I saw it too, man. Looks like a vehicle's passed this way—you can see the trail of crushed grass over there.
—Is that a Jeep down there, way off to the right up against the trees? Not enough moonlight for me to be sure.
Can't tell, but yeah, I think it's a car or truck or something. Who'd be driving down there?
—Maybe whoever Ariel's going to turn her victims over to!
Here we go. It's more open ahead. Let's see if we can flank this mob.
Once out of the narrow alley, Dipper and Wendy angled out and hustled. The tall grass wanted to tangle their ankles and soaked their jeans with dew, but they gradually gained on Ariel, now about twenty feet ahead, now fifteen, now ten.
She was a few steps in the lead of the others, with no kids close to her. Wendy and Dipper, coordinated in their movements by their touch-telepathy, approached to within only a few feet of her when she suddenly stopped and jerked around, her pale eyes wide with shock as she noticed them. Her tune changed, and the crowd of captivated teens paused, not waling, just swaying dreamily.
Ariel—there's no good way of describing it—shot jets of music at Dipper and Wendy, which they both heard and felt. Dipper's head spun with a suggestion to follow, follow, follow, while Wendy flinched under a stern go away!
They resisted and even took a couple of steps closer.
The sharp music cut into their minds again.
Dipper's hand tightened on Wendy's.
And in a deadly serious voice, Wendy said, "Lady, drop the flute and kick it away!"