Short Story / One for Sorrow (Analysis)
A room. Iron and plaster and cracks. Faded yellow and peeling and everything an abandoned building should be. Except it’s not abandoned. At least, not entirely. Someone has come here to find companionship, in something, anything, as lost and alone as they are.
It’s not exactly comforting, but it passes the time.
Long ago this building was a warehouse. This sluggish, black as bile, so-called river, once supplied the men here with more imports and exports than they could handle. Not any more of course. Even their ghosts, are gone.
The first floor is nothing but a vast hall, a concrete mound of broken lumps spilling over from the quayside. Otherwise, the place is empty. The only access is an outside, shard strewn staircase that leads nowhere but a broken window.
On the second used to live the workers. And they’re families. It was like a miniature town all of it’s own, each honest and un-honest soul, jammed together in hard little rooms, family feuds growing with the years and a thousand lives that meant nothing to the world all ending in their separate ways. Nothing but brick dust now.
Like the poet says, we’re all alone in the end.
The third floor is little more than an attic. The roof is fallen in all over, with the bare ribs of history laid open to the sky. Joists jut. Boards are broken. It doesn’t matter.
Because on the third floor, lives the ghost.
He is flesh and blood like you and I but, nether the less, a ghost. Pale and wasted and forgotten he has come here to die, something he’s finding remarkably hard to do.
He’s been trying to die for nearly seventy years now.
He hasn’t aged a hair in all that time. The wonder is that he’s not given up.
While the rest of the site is night, a black and wasted void that sucks at the mind, the third floor’s broken pyramid gapes into a sky spun with stars. Here, in this palace of shadows, is the meeting of the two; of man’s light and nature’s light; of necessity and beauty, of the honest and the false. Here, starlight is fought by rivers of fire, by the brilliant tongue of orange flame. From the back of the room, from the top of the discarded stairs, looking out through the slateless roof to the river glittering beyond, to the city with all it’s midnight lights ablaze in amber, the meeting must look quite a sight.
There are the crackling, spitting timbers. There are the points of silver, hung there by some mighty hand. There is the dancing fire, the rising heat that is joy. There is the tumbling glow, the fallen cold that is sorrow.
And there is the man, who is not a man.
Who is a ghost.
Watching. Alone.
Always alone.
Somewhere, far across the city, but sounding as if it’s echoes cover centuries, a bell tolls twelve times. Midnight. The witching hour. The one we shall call a man, listens. He has heard those notes before, heard those twelve sad tolls many times over all the years. He is old now, but he knows that is not the reason for the mess of his mind. He can no long distinguish what is truth and what is myth anymore. You see, the stories have eaten away at his mind.
Yet every time he hears the twelve summons (for they are summons my dear, oh yes) he remembers, as if it were yesterday, one hot July day, when he first arrived in that place. When it all began. He had been so proud. Now, he hates himself for ever having imagined he would reach the heights he did. It is one of the only certainties now in his maddened, tangled mind. His self-revulsion.
If we dabble not in dreams, we can never bring them out into the light of harsh reality.
Our man rises. He stands, basking in the glow before him for a long, long time. Like this place he is wasted, reduced to stick thin limbs, with dead or dying skin the colour of bone stretched taught over them. He is not a pretty sight. The cheekbones are sharp and cruel, the face is sallow, a terrible, pointed madness. He is moonchild. The only man born of her. And he is dead to the world.
The eyes are obsidian.
They look as if he has never slept, or that his sockets are pools of ink and dark, dead blood, into which his ordinary eyes had sunk long ago.
And yet his face… is the skull of an angel.
You would expect him to move with grace and poise, slowly and majestically. Cat like. But, after the long, mad, stare into the flames, his first movements are hurried, hesitant and jerky. A junkie’s twitch. Shuffle, shuffle, stop, close eyes against the darkness inside, speed up breathing, sudden stop, eyes open, shuffle and shuffle and shuffle…
The stories aren’t all that’s attacking his mind.
The coat is old. Ankle length. Its faded blue material is stained with grime. Like this city. Like this world. Of course it is only at first glace blue. It is the colour of the sea. Not the colour the sea is but… the true colour of the sea. And yet too there is sky woven into it, a shimmer under stains. Purple and indigo and egg shell blue and beads of amber woven into its thick threads. Bones and feathers and on occasion the odd tooth, long and sharp and knife-like. The coat is very old indeed.
A thousand pockets. The thin hands reach, like crawling spiders, each white finger a long, thin leg, into them and produce every item inside, throwing them down before the fire.
Among them are three glass vials and a single medical syringe. Heroin is cheap among the lonely and the dammed. Especially for a man of the piper’s talents.
He stops, and holds out one pale palm face up. In it, glittering in the flames, is a tiny shell. Walnut wood inlaid with brass in a single encompassing band. Into the shell is set a lock. An ordinary lock you may look through and see nothing more remarkable than the other side. If you looked here, if you pressed your eye to the perfectly formed vau, you would see nothing. Nothing at all. He threw the key away long ago.
The boy with the limp. Who could not follow. Who told the first story. Who made him what he is.
He’s in here.
Whether it was for revenge or for company, or some strange and bitter mixture of the two, or even for some other long forgotten reason even he cannot remember. But tonight he forgives and forgets and lets go. Tonight, everything changes.
In a sudden movement, violent and terrible, he crushes the beautiful prison and casts the fragments into the fire. It might have been he heard a whispered sigh, of death and of relief, as the lapping inferno consumed its prize. It might have been some night sound, a bird perhaps, comforting its lover. It might have been his mind is so addled he could hear anything. He knows this, and he doesn’t care.
It might have been he heard nothing at all.
Now the boy’s story is ended. His tale carries on, but he will never walk the garden of forking ways again, never step the path of destiny that is both one and many roads at once. Even if he fails tonight, one soul at least is saved.
The man (who is not) continues to empty his jacket. Notebooks filled with manic scribblings; pots of ink; stubs of pencil; crumpled, forlorn feathers cut to quill point. There are pegs and valves, strings and bridges, all manner of broken instrument parts. They lie in the lights dead lustre like the lost fragments of forgotten lives.
It hurts to realise he has no memory of any of them. Except, of course, the three little vials.
Outside exhausted, he delves within to the second coat, his inner sanctum. Three items. The first is a Polaroid, black, and white, and wonderfully alive. The woman is young, beautiful and decidedly naked.
There is the part of the story they never told the children.
He loved her. She let him think she loved him.
He was a piper and he was a master of his art. And he had his pride. At least that’s one point they still remember. His pride drove him. He had told her, even after she had turned her back on him, he had told her what he felt. What as a piper he had been trained never to feel except when he played, when the music followed through his soul. And she laughed at him. They had all laughed at him.
Love is strong. Magic is strong. But music is sometimes stronger still. And in the end is there really any difference?
That was before it happened, before he went mad, and doing so sent the music mad too. Before the children danced and the hills rang and the rivers ran with blood.
The woman in the photograph was born in the fifties. Not the lady of legend. An echo, of a memory, of a dream perhaps, but no nearer. She was eighteen when she had loved him. He had but loved the memory of another woman. She had given to him what she had promised not to give, and he had taken it and called aloud another name as tears streamed down her face. Then, ashamed, he had left her.
She downed herself in autumn.
After that the depression got worse. After that he had started trying to die again.
He places the photograph to his lips, cracked and callous and cold. Then, it too is swallowed by the fire. The fire bigger now than any fire should be.
The second item. A hat. “Black enough to match the night, wide enough to cheat the sun and tall enough to trump a trickster”. That’s how the old song goes, though no one sings it now. Pipers were important once, and Hamlin’s was the greatest of them all.
And the last.
Holding the brim he drops every discarded item into it. Then, with a flourish, they are cast into oblivion. The hat sags in his hand, time slows down and he stares.
Then, for the first time in five hundred years, he puts it on. He’s going to end it how he started it.
The coat crackles in the impossible fire. Colours flicker from it and blossom into the never-ending night. Fire engulfs the sea. The blaze is like a beacon now, reaching up with spark-strung hands to catch the falling stars. Beautiful, and powerful, older than anything. This is not simply fire now, this is the fire. The fire than fell from the sky in a roar of a thousand tongues and split the bastions of the earth and kindled the trees. The fire the first men brought down from the hill to their tribe and changed the world with. The fire that lives in the music.
In the old days, before he’d even heard of Hamelin, he’d dance and caper, leap from rooftop to window ledge, from chimney to crumbling wall, his shoes pointed, leather, single belled and all in black.
But for the lining of his cloak. Pied it was, bones and midnight satin. Black and white and silver bells.
Tonight he doesn’t dance. It hurts to remember. Hurts more than he can say.
There is no way the cloak could have been under that. It certainly wasn’t there before. Nether the less, it hangs off his shoulders, folded wings in the shadowlight, that pools about it feet. He raises his arms and in his mind the strings begin to sing. The piano is faster. The percussion are ready. The pain is waiting, on the edge of the darkness behind his eyes. It can wait a little longer.
The cloak has no pockets, yet from it he reveals the last and dearest of his possessions.
The pipe.
It is carved from bone, and after half a thousand years it still plays better than any other. He lifts it to his lips, and the music is moon and stars and fire and darkness. It is the song of the piper, of this piper, the only real, true piper there ever was. The Piped-Piper of Hamelin.
In the heat that shimmers above the fire the line between dreams and reality wavers, and melds. Out of that bone flute flows a tale that is strange and dark and terrible in all senses of the word. But it is, above all, the truth.
Or close enough.
“Once upon a time…” the storyteller says, and thus the story begins. There are love and lies, tricks and wonders, heroes and villains, just as every story must. In the strangeness above the fire the characters we all know in our hearts trap the charcoal boards, their shapes twisting flares and striking flames. The frightened, jeering crowd. The thin, be-speckled mayor, and his wealthy, pompous patron (who is where the real power lies you see my dear). The boy with the limp. The girl with winter’s eyes and a scarlet ribbon. The beauty and her lover (who is of course the patron) and, watching from the gutter, waiting for their moment, the rats in all their silent multitude.
When he plays the junkie’s twitch is gone.
“I don’t love you,” she laughs, “I never loved you” and the laughter echoes all around as he flees the town.
The first warning arrives. Pay or worse will follow. But the mayor can’t pay. The patron and his beauty are long gone and anyway, what can a mere minstrel do? But miles away the patron’s horse throws its riders to the ground and tramples them to death. The last thing she sees, are silver bells.
He burns the second threat as well.
The crowd stood in the river as the rats swam back, as they return form the piper’s keeping. The waters resound and splash as the cudgels strike.
The cripple sits by the fountain. “He’s taken them!” he cries, “He’s taken all my friends!” It’s then the townsfolk realise.
The river runs red with children’s blood. In the water father’s weep at what they’ve done. In the mountains the piper smiles and hates himself.
On hanging day they string him up. He says nothing.
By tomorrow the body is gone. The people move on, try to forget. But there is no forgetting. The town dies. In time, another city will be built there. It uses the old name.
But it is not Hamelin.
He tells his tale, through music that is like song. He plays of the years of never dying, of the ages of loneliness, of how he is the story’s puppet who must simply exist and every day become an little more lost, a little more mad. He tells of one cursed and who pleads forgiveness.
Then, when the last note is played, when the last word is said, he stops, and hangs his head.
The fire is gone. The abandoned mementos burnt away. As if they were never there at all. He kneels in the twilight before dawn and sobs with the rain. He is soaked to the skin, alone, in the darkness.
Look up piper, look up.
A voice, inside his head. All tonight’s work has achieved it seems is a fall into further madness.
Look up moonchild. If you seek ending, look to me.
Slowly, he raises his head. He walks to the edge of the building, where the wall and ceiling have long gone, and stares out across the world. Before him, flames of morning spread their first fingers. The night is dying. He sees all this, as if for the first time.
And then, as the disc of life rises across the horizon, he understands.
With a wordless cry of sorrow and gladness he leaps from the boards and spreads his wings. The cloak billows out, pipe and hat lost in the gale. For a moment he hangs suspended in the morning, in the piercing light, spread-eagled against the dawn.
He is the sun.
And then the air erupts with an explosion of wings. A multitude of magpies, their interweaving cries wonderful and beautiful. They are cries of freedom.
And the buildings echo, with the laughter of children.
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Fantastic. I enjoyed every aspect of it. From the story itself, full of emotion, to the amazing wordplay used. You use similie well, and have the knack of conjouring up the images suggested with ease.
One of my favourite books is based on the Pied Piper story, and its also very dark:
..if you’re interested. Thanks for the read ~
Paul
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I think that this story is really very good, original, using words of description that really captivates. But I think you need to flow your sentences out a little bit; there’s too many choppy sentences.
I thought this was an excellent piece of writing. The imagery is fantastic and laced with clever analogies. I did notice some typos, especially early on, but it doesn’t detract from the work. I think you are very talented.
Shane O’Neill
-‘ghosts, are’ => No comma.
-‘workers. And’ => Change period to comma.
-‘un-honest’ just sounds strange. Try using ‘deceptive’ or something like that in place of it.
-nether = never (typically, it’s typed as one word ‘nevertheless’ or use ‘nonetheless.’ Both work equally well.)
-‘While the rest…’ => This sentence is a bit awkward. Maybe something like ‘While the rest of the house is shrouded in darkness during the evening hours, the third floor’s ceiling is open, allowing the starry night to shine in.’ or something like that.
-‘You see, the…’ => No ‘you see’ just start the sentence with ‘The…’
-‘for they are summons my dear, oh yes’ => You already said they were summons. No real need to repeat it. Also, you don’t want to talk to the reader, unless it’s from a first person point of view.
-”...at first glace blue.” => Not really sure what you’re trying to get at here. Is the jacket blue or not? If so, why is it at first glance (I assume that’s the word)?
-Saying it’s the color of the sea, but not, but it is. Pick one or the other. Or just start out by saying it’s the true color of the sea.
-“Purple and…” => Change the first three ‘and’s to commas.
-“formed vau…” => Vau?
-“(who is not)” => Instead of making comments about the man (who isn’t a man), why not give him a name? That way, you don’t have to keep making various additions to show who you’re talking about? Obviously he’s an integral part of the story, so why not name him?
-Ok. The music goes mad. Kind of a stretch, but I get it. But, the sentence after that confuses me. His melodies rang through the valley, but they also made the river run with blood? That’s some powerful music. To both enlighten people and then scare them? I think I know what you were going for there, but you’ll want to make sure that you clarify that a bit more if you meant it differently.
-“who is where…” => Don’t make sidebar comments about your characters. If it’s important enough to have a comment, then include it as part of the story, rather than putting parentheses around it.
-”...music that is like song.” => Really awkward. Is a song not music? Does music not consist of songs? Might want to change that around.
-I think you’ve got a great basis here, it just needs to be tightened up. Make sure to check your run-on sentences at the door and take care of some of the spelling errors (if not all of them). Ignoring the opportunities for improvement, you’ve got a really great story. Don’t stop now! Re-work it and post it again. Good luck and thanks for sharing!
This was an extremely enjoyable piece to read. It has been written extremely gracefully (almost poetically) and you have used the limited word-count granted to a writer of short-stories well. Not a word wasted; not a word delivered without impact, without evoking an emotion.
The few corrections I was able to find would be easily correctable with simple proof-reading. For example (I know it’s not part of the text itself but..) in the notes to reviewers: “This was writtern mid 2007”.
Second page of the story “He can no long distinguish what is truth and what is myth anymore.” – the spelling of “longer” needs to be corrected to include the “er” and, also, for syntactical reasons I believe this sentence should either be “He can no longer distinguish what is truth and what is myth.” or “He cannot distinguish what is truth and what is myth anymore.” (I personally it should be the prior as this seems to fit best with your style of writing)
Third page, I believe “the face is sallow” was intended to be “the face is shallow”. While I’m on the third page: your use of “the” to begin every sentence in which you describe an object or a feature, when used many times in a row as you have early on, works well with this piece and adds a slight uneasiness which I believe works perfectly for your purpose. However, later in the same page where you do the same thing but only once, this seems out of place and incorrect as it has now been seperated from the repetition of breaking the rule.
Sixth page, Im assuming that “She downed” is meant as “She drowned”.
Seventh page. I’m not sure whether “The fire than fell” is supposed to be “The fire that fell” or “The fire then fell”... But I’m almost certain that it should be one or the other. Also, I believe “The Piped-Piper of Hamelin” is meant as “The Pied-Piper of Hamelin” though I cant be sure of this.
Despite these simple mistakes, I feel compelled to rate this piece a 10. You have an incredible tallent! I have no trouble saying that this was the most enjoyable read that I’ve had on Urbis for as long as I can remember (and even ranks among my most enjoyable reads ever!). I will be favoriting this piece, most likely labeling myself as a fan of your writing and suggest that – if you haven’t already done so – you attempt to have this piece published as I believe you would have no trouble in doing so.
Keep up the good work!
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