THE PIED PIPER HAS RETURNED!
Welcome to Bloody Twine Presents #8! BT Presents #8 features Pied, a novella originally published in Bloody Twine #7.
In 1980, Edgar Tannenbaum is dying of pancreatic cancer, but he has one last story to tell before he passes on. He wishes to give away a singular gold guilder, a gold coin his war buddy, Ray, discovered in WWII Germany. Ms. Cadence Grieves from the museum comes to collect the coin, but there’s more to that coin than meets the eye.
With the cursed coin in his possession, Edgar weaves a tale of woe for Ms. Greives, that tale from his own life in 1953, when he was mayor of Hamelin, a small town in the ’50s’ American South.
Edgar tells the story of how “Pied” Joe Piper arrives in Hamelin to chase out the Rats, a vicious biker gang intent on murder and destruction. All Piper asks in return for his service is Edgar’s “lucky” coin, because that coin is part of set of 1000, and Piper has 999 of them.
Once Piper’s deed is done, Edgar refuses to give up the coin and chases away Joe Piper, but unlike the original Brothers Grimm’ story, Piper is angry this time, so he comes back to Hamelin with a whole band!
Pied is divided into two parts, and here’s an excerpt from each:
Pied Part I
Where did he come from?
This “Joe Piper” was a tall white man, around six-one, and he had a square face with a weathered but handsome look, a middle-aged man close to Edgar’s own age of fifty. This stranger’s short, clean-cut black hair held a tinge of grey along the sides, a salt-and-pepper look that gave him a distinguished air…
Average Read Time: 39m 43s
Pied Part II
And more importantly, where did he go?
Three people in white suits and white fedoras, the woman out of the three in a white skirt rather than pants, had walked in and were standing near the exit and entrance to the street. One of them was a middle-aged man with broad shoulders carrying a strap drum, another was a large black man with a banjo, and the last was a red-haired woman in her thirties holding a fiddle…
Average Read Time: 42m 50s
Imagine walking into an abandoned storage room filled with old newspapers and magazines, all articles stacked in bundles neatly tied with twine, but then you discover other bundles, bundles not so neatly tied, ragged bundles of yellowed and partially charred paper tied in bloodstained twine.
You see, some stories are meant to educate, and some stories are meant to entertain, but some stories…some stories are simply looking for a victim.
Enjoy.
