L U L L A B Y

Music should be wind… carry you away; not cave for hiding.

Alexandra Chen remembered her mother's words as she labored over the keyboard with the obstinate tune.  No matter how she tried, she could not find the finishing layer, that final perfection of melody and thunder.  She had tried so many different combinations, but none of them had felt right. 

Alex would know when the piece was finished.  Her spine always tingled when the sounds came together; the magic touched her at the neck, tickled her like a playful lover before tracing a maddening line to the small of her back.  Nothing else brought on the sensation, not the poetry she loved to read, not the foreign films that made her cry late at night as tragedy flickered across her Panasonic's screen, not the touch of any man, not even the man whom she had briefly married.  Even the grinning face of her daughter, Melody, while magical and indescribably important, could not bring on the sensation, which felt like light twinkling between her shoulder blades.  Only perfect music could physically move her in this way.

Writing the music for her first album had been relatively simple.  All the riffs Alexandra had composed over a lifetime had provided a suitable cache of material for her first recording. And while the second album took a stronger hand to refine the rough remnants left from her maiden voyage into the studio, Alex had managed to whip the chords into crisp staccato when she poured her anger into an overture or caressed a melody until it moaned lovingly above a silken sheet of sustained rapture.

But this piece, Mama Chen, a tribute to her mother, was by far the most important project of her life.  The woman that had forced her to sit at her piano day after day until Alex saw the beauty she could make the instrument produce, for her this music was made.  And it must be perfect.  It would be perfect. 

Nothing else would suitably honor Mae Chen.

The melody came from a Chinese folksong that her mother had sung to her as she lay in her cradle.  Alex played it on the Prophet keyboard in her living room.  After trying several settings, she combined the harpsichord and the pipe organ to give it a melancholy richness.  The harpsichord setting always gave her the creeps, but sometimes it just worked.  The rhythm was purely Asian.  Heavy drums, more Japanese Taiko than Chinese, thundered over the drum machine.  Accompanying these were chimes and a single cymbal splash every eighth beat.

The music taunted her.  It was almost perfect, almost done, but one element was missing and Alex would be damned if she could figure it out.  She'd tried to cut back on the percussion, then tried to boost it.  She'd tried every harmony possible with various instruments, which might have been authentic to the time, but nothing filled the void in the composition.

Alex pushed a series of buttons and let the tracks play.  The opening overture of Mama Chen, was six minutes and twenty seconds long. 

Once it had played out, Alex hit the button again and then looped the entire piece so it would play repeatedly in the hopes that this immersion would reveal the missing layer of music to Alexandra.

Retrieving a glass of Pinot Grigio, Alex listened to the tune from a distance to see if something came to her.  She tried humming a different harmony line, but it was lost after the first note.  Alex fell on her couch and let her mother's lullaby fill her as she remembered a childhood defined by the confusion of two cultures. 

Those had been rough times.  Her father had worked for a small plastics plant and made little more than minimum wage. Their tiny studio apartment in Seattle attested to their poverty, and Alex remembered curling up with her brothers, Joseph and Charles, on the floor for warmth.  Photographs of the American Dream, cut from magazines and reverently framed in cheap fabric, hung above torn and battered furniture. Still, despite the penny scavenging and the meals of broth and stale rice, she remembered kindness and love.

Even as a small baby she remembered, or thought she had remembered, her mother's spectral presence. A round, moon-shaped face with too many teeth floated above her; lovingly it gazed; beautifully it sang.  No words accompanied the melody.  No lyrics complicated the series of notes, only her mother's pure delivery of a crystalline line of music to lull a baby to sleep.  And though Alexandra tried, she could not separate this memory from another: the memory of her father running into the room, grabbing her mother's shoulders and shaking her, yelling at her in a language which Alex never quite grasped.   The thought always brought anger.  Why would the man deny Mae Chen the simple pleasure of a lullaby?

Memories of her father were difficult for Alex.  Always so cold, so distant, the man had treated her like a piece of furniture that was never in the right part of the room.  He cared about her, this was obvious, and once he had landed a job with a software company after two years of night school, the man seemed to be content with himself, if not with those around him.  He scoffed at her piano lessons, scoffed at her mother's insistence of them.

The last time Alex had heard the lullaby, she had been five years old, just a few months before her father went to work for Microsoft.  Tension filled the tiny studio apartment.  Money, while earned, could never be found when it was needed.  Joseph or Charles was always sick; Alex always seemed to have a cold.  Mae Chen had seemed in a constant state of panic, pulling her hair and squawking in Chinese as she fluttered about the room like a recently decapitated chicken. 

Late on a particularly hot Seattle night, Alex awoke to find her mother singing at her bedside.  Fanning herself lightly with a tattered magazine, Mae Chen sang to her daughter.  So softly, barely a whisper, almost a hum, the voice stroked Alex's cheek like a tender palm.

This was the first time that Alex remembered the light dancing between her shoulder blades, the tiny hairs on her neck fluttering.  She had said nothing to her mother then, preferring to lay in the warm bath of her voice.  But then as always, her father appeared.  He grabbed Mae Chen by the shoulders and swung her around.  Alex began crying immediately.  Her mother looked terrified.  Her father was beyond control.

"Not in village," he bellowed, shaking Mae Chen as if she were nothing more than a wrinkled jacket. "America now."

"No money," Mae Chen cried.

"America now!"

Her father's cruelty rarely found physical release, but on that night he slapped Mae Chen's cheek and pushed her to the floor.  With a quick hard glance, he regarded his crying daughter and threw his hands into the air. 

The lullaby was lost for over two decades.  Alex took piano lessons at her mother's request.  Her father began making a small fortune with Microsoft.  At least, it had seemed like a small fortune compared to their spare beginnings. After two years, her father came home with a chipped upright piano that was missing the middle C note, but Alex fell on the present like it was the greatest instrument ever made.  Hours of the day passed as she punched the polished keys.  Then years passed as she learned reed and wind instruments.  Everything musical thrilled her, and the mystery of the notes and the composition revealed itself to her through study and practice.

When her eyes got heavy, Alex put the wine down on the coffee table and leaned back.  The ceiling offered little inspiration but it kept her mind away from fighting with the combinations of notes and rhythms.  If she didn't think about it, the missing element of the overture might come.

Alex's mind drifted, carried away on the breeze of music.  The flute she'd added sounded quite good.  Just a drifting series of notes in the first three beats.  Da Dah Da.  Just two notes.  What were they?  She couldn't remember what she'd programmed, but suddenly the chill came at the base of her neck and light sparked along her spine.  -

And then Alex realized she hadn't programmed anything.  There shouldn't have been a flute in the composition.

But that's what it needed.  Her dozing mind had brought the answer.  She sat upright and ran to the keyboard.  The flute still rang in her ear, but it was distant, like a memory.  She hit the yellow button, which shut down the loop and then searched the keyboard for the notes. 

The flute still played, but it had taken up the melody.  Alex turned.  The sound she'd attributed to her memory, to her own creation drifted through her door from a place in the hall.

She didn't know there were any musicians in the building.

Alex had to find the source that had completed her composition.  She hurried to the door and swung it open, but the hall was empty.  She ran her eyes up towards the elevator and back towards the stairway. 

The door to the stairs slowly swung closed.  She ran and hit the stairway three steps up.  She heard heavy footsteps beating a path towards the roof.  Her breath caught in her side, but Alex kept running.  She called "wait," and was surprised when the footsteps ceased.  When they started again, she realized she hadn't taken the opportunity to catch up.

A moment later the door to the roof slammed shut.  Alex walked up the remaining stairs.  She wheezed and coughed. Sweat slathered the back of her neck.  Outside the door to the roof, Alex rested for a moment.  She didn't want the musician to think some psychopath was in pursuit.  Her breath under control, she pushed against the metal plate in the middle of the door and allowed light to slowly creep onto the roof.

Frigid night air greeted her as Alex swung open the door.  But the air didn't make her stop running.  The musician did. 

It was approximately the shape of a human being, though larger in musculature.  The head was smooth.   A ridge encircled the skull like a halo.  Though clearly bone and flesh, the ridge came to a razor sharp edge.  The hand, which held a small, hand-carved pipe, seemed too long, like a paddle.  At the end of human fingers, thin needles protruded instead of fingernails.  A rough-hewn black vest stretched over the musician's massive torso.  Trousers, secured with a length of hemp, were like those worn by Slavic peasants from an old Dracula movie.  The pants were tucked into high, black leather boots.

"Where is it?" The Piper asked.  The voice was as light as the flute's music.  But this voice was fuller and lacked the subtle delivery of the pipe.

Alex backed into the door.  She felt behind her for the knob, but her shaking hands only caressed metal.

The Piper stepped forward, its boots crunching in the gravel on the roof.  He pointed a thick arm at Alex.  "Have you teased me?"

"No," Alex choked.  Now fear brought the light into her back, but it was not dancing.  The electric charge trembled.

"Then where is it?"  The Piper asked, continuing towards Alex, its form growing, blocking out the city beyond impossibly broad shoulders.

"What do you want?"

The Piper stopped and cocked its head to the side like a curious dog.  "Do you offer more than one?"  A thick trail of saliva dribbled from the mouth.  "A girl and a boy?"

Her heart tripped in the cage of her chest. What was this thing saying?  "I don't have any children," she lied, thinking of Melody.

"And yet you called me."  The Piper mused.  "Why would you call me if you had nothing to offer; nothing to dispose of?"

The musical quality of the beast's voice played in counterpoint to its ominous appearance.  Like the harpsichord, the voice seemed completely unthreatening, yet carried an unnerving timbre, and the message it delivered could not be considered without threat.  Alex regarded the beast, fully aware that she had little chance of outrunning or out maneuvering it.

"I've come a long way for you," The Piper accused, drilling a stare through her.  "Great travels create great hunger. And now, you have nothing to offer?" It stepped forward, the flute in its hand drumming against a thigh.  "Perhaps you are my reward.  Do you offer yourself?  Is your succulence intact, or have you dried and rotted like all aging things?"

The Piper stopped a foot from Alex. Her voice caught in her throat, enmeshed in a coil of dread.  Brilliant green eyes glowed in small diamond shaped sockets.  It leaned forward.  The vest opened to reveal a powerful chest, which had been pierced with thin ivory rods.  Breath without odor crept along Alex's face, and when the lips parted Alex fought to keep conscious.  Rows of tiny pointed teeth filled the mouth.  Each looked the size of a thumbtack, but there were hundreds of them.

"And," the musician continued, "don't think that I intend to starve.  If you have tricked me..."

From a building across the street, the low wailing of a child came up in the night.  The cry rose in crescendo before fading.  After a brief silence, the voice rose again.

Thick fluid oozed from the corners of The Piper's mouth and it swung its head around to note the direction of the sound.  The razor sharp halo about its skull passed within an inch of Alex's brow. A low hiss escaped the creature's throat.  When it turned to regard Alex the muscles over its eyes jumped.  The Piper turned and ran to the edge of the roof.  Without hesitation it dove headfirst into the night.  The shattering of glass was quickly followed by the hysterical screaming of a woman.

A moment later, the musician again walked across the roof.  Alex had found the door; it stood open, and her body was already in the threshold.  She glanced back. 

The Piper held a garrote in one hand; hanging from this was the squirming form of a baby; its wails strangled by the rough rope holding it. "This first," it said.  "Then my due."

 The musician sat down on the roof and released the child from the noose.  It lifted the infant to its mouth and began to eat, tearing away the left side of the child with a single bite as a frantic cry burst into the night. 

The baby's cries evaporated as strong jaws crunched through bone, and the Piper's lips smacked like applause to capture escaping viscera.

Alex's stomach rose to the back of her throat.  She stumbled backwards and down the stairs, barely keeping upright as she caught each step just before tumbling.  Her mind scrambled, trying to picture her escape.  One floor down and then to the bank of elevators.  She saw herself pushing the button and riding down until she could escape to some kind of safety.

The Piper had said that she had called him. How could Alexandra possibly have called this creature? 

She slammed open the door to the twenty-sixth floor and raced along the dimly lit hall to the center where the elevators could be called.  She pushed the button, jabbed at it frantically as if she could raise the car with her insistence.  Alex looked back over her shoulder, scanning the hall, but the musician had not yet appeared in the doorway. 

The thin, airy sound of a flute wafted through the hall.  The melody was familiar.  Her mother's lullaby teased her ears, caused her spine to flare.

A shape appeared in the far doorway.  The Piper's torso blocked out all but a hint of the light behind it.  Please God, Alex thought, turning back to the elevator bank and pushing the button.  The Piper stepped into the hall as the bell rang announcing the arrival of the car.  The doors opened reluctantly, and Alex hurried in, pushing the lobby button as she heard the musician's heavy feet stomping towards the car.

The doors hobbled towards one another like wounded lovers.  The wait was maddening.  Any moment The Piper would face her from the hall and then push his way into the car, and then what could she do?  Trapped, a boxed lunch for the freak.  Hurry she thought, her body trembling, her foot stamping a tattoo on the ugly elevator carpet.

And the musician appeared.  Only a sliver of space remained between the two injured doors.  She saw the beast's eyes flare like radiated emeralds, and then the creature was gone, closed off from her.  Tears ran along her cheeks as Alex rode the car to the lobby.  Her heart thundered in her ears. 

Once she reached the lobby she would...

Would what?

She remembered the creature springing from the roof, taking the child from the neighboring building.  Surely it couldn't fly?  But what was to stop it from leaping to the pavement outside of her building, waiting for its due on the brightly lit street or in the lobby?  Her heart skipped.  What if it was waiting as the doors opened?

She tried to stop the car on the sixth floor but missed it.  She hit five and then four and then three.  It stopped on four, and Alex ran into the hall.  She ran to the first door, and knocked loudly.  No answer.  Christ.  No answer.  Her knuckles ached as she pounded again, but the apartment was empty. 

The elevator door closed behind her, continuing its journey to the lobby.

It might not find her here, not for a while anyway. Her mind worked over the strange words of The Piper until she began to understand that it had come for Melody. The creature wanted Alex's daughter.  He wanted to…

Thank God Melody was at her father's house in Kirkland for the weekend.  She'd be safe.  Oh, let her be safe.

A door opened behind her and Alexandra cried out.  She whipped around to face a well-built man in his early forties with graying red hair and a white mustache and goatee.

James Thayer eyed the sweating, panicked woman before him with suspicion for a second before recognizing her from shared trips in the elevator and then Thayer quickly ushered Alex into his apartment.  "Phone's right over there," he said, pointing a beefy forearm to a table beside the white sofa in the middle of the room.  "Did someone break into your place?" he asked.

"No," Alex said over her shoulder as she dashed for the phone.  "He broke into the building."

Thayer quickly locked the deadbolt on his door and threw the chain before joining Alex at the sofa.  The police arrived twenty minutes later.  A tall man in uniform, Dan Muir, and a stout woman in uniform, Kate Green, stood motionlessly as Alex described the crazy Piper she had encountered on the roof of the building.  When it came time to give a description, Alex faltered.

"He was wearing a costume," she finally said.  "One of those really intricate Halloween costumes with a rubber head."  Only then could she describe the halo of bone around the musician's skull and the endless rows of tiny, pin-sized, teeth.  "He was big, maybe six foot four or five."

"Was he armed?" officer Green asked, jotting down a note on her pad before Alex could answer.

Alexandra shook her head.  "But he's very strong."

Officer Muir asked for Alexandra's apartment number and then instructed her to remain with Thayer while they checked out the roof and her apartment.  James Thayer offered her a drink and when she refused this, he offered her a Xanax, which she also refused.  Thayer helped himself to both.

* * *

"This is great," Officer Dan Muir said, ogling Alexandra Chen's keyboards and recording equipment.  "I used to play keys for a band before the whole grunge thing took over this town.  We rocked."  His fingers went to the keys and he brushed middle C lovingly.  "I haven't played in years. I wonder if I still have my chops."

"Don't even think about it," Officer Kate Green told him.

"I've got two of her CD's," Officer Muir said, as if this created an appropriate connection to the artist, which might give him the right to touch Alexandra's personal belongings.  "She plays all of the instruments herself.  She's really amazing."

"Then leave the music to her," Officer Green said.  "We still have to check the roof."

"Oh lighten up," Dan Muir said, hitting the playback button. "I'm not hurting anything."

* * *

The police did not return after thirty minutes and Alexandra began to worry.  When they did not return after an hour, Alexandra panicked.

"Maybe they've already caught him," Thayer suggested with thick-tongued enthusiasm.  "They might be chasing him, or following some lead they found on the roof.  It's not like television; they don't always solve these things in an hour.  Do you want another Xanax?"

Alex had not taken the first Xanax, so she certainly was not inclined to take a second.  "No thank you."

"I think I'll have one," Thayer said.  "To take the edge off."

Twenty minutes later, James Thayer had passed out on his sofa and snored loudly as Alex paced through the man's apartment.  She called her ex-husband's house for the fourth time that night.

David Carter answered on the third ring.  "Yeah?"

The weight fell from Alexandra's shoulders as she took in her ex-husband's casual tone.  "Can I speak with Melody?" Alex asked.

"Yeah," David said.  "Hold on."

"Mommeee," Melody cried into the phone.  The sound of her voice sent the twinkling lights afire between Alex's shoulder blades.  "We went to a movie and to the mall, and the movie was in the mall, and we ate a lot of popcorn."

Alexandra was in tears, grateful to hear Melody's happy voice.  "That's great, sweetheart," she said.  "But shouldn't you be in bed?"

"Not tired," Melody said defiantly. 

"Well you be good," Alex said.  "Put your daddy back on the phone, now.  I love you sweetheart."

"Love too," Melody giggled.  "Daddeeee," she cried.

"Yeah?" David Carter said.

Alexandra quickly explained the evening's events to her ex-husband.  "Another whacko fan?" David asked.

"I actually hadn't thought of that," Alexandra said.  But no, this Piper was not a stalker and he was not a fan, though he might well have been a fanatic. 

Alexandra had not told her husband, just as she had not told the police, about the Piper diving over the side of the building and returning with the crying child.  She could not explain it rationally, so she hadn't bothered to explain it at all.  She kept trying to convince herself that she hadn't seen it, hadn't heard the glass shattering and the baby's final cry before being devoured by the Piper.

* * *

Alexandra hung up the phone when the doorbell rang.  James Thayer startled out of his noisy sleep and wiped his eyes.  He looked confused by the Asian woman pacing his living room, and then his head cleared and he pushed himself from the sofa.

"Who is it?" Thayer asked in a deep, gruff voice.

"Police," a strong voice replied.

But when James Thayer opened the door, neither Officer Muir nor Officer Green stood in the hallway.  Instead, two different police officers, both men and both very angry, stood beyond his threshold.

They pushed their way into the apartment, ignoring James Thayer's barrage of questions before stopping in the middle of the room to address Alexandra.

"You made an emergency call at ten-oh-nine this evening?"

"Yes," Alex said.  "There was an intruder."

"We dispatched Officers Green and Muir two hours ago and they haven't checked in."

Alex told these officers the same story she had told Green and Muir, about the man in the Halloween costume that had threatened her and chased her through the halls of her apartment building.  When she finished the story, the tall police officer that looked like a recent college graduate, with his youth and his wire framed glasses, said, "We'd like you to show us your apartment."

She thanked James Thayer for his hospitality and followed the police back into the hall.  The door to Thayer's apartment closed quickly and Alex heard him throwing the locks into place.

The police went over her story again, speaking her words back to her as they rode the elevator to the twenty-sixth floor.  "And you're certain you don't know this man?"

"I don't know anyone built like that," Alex said.  "My friends are musicians, and they rarely spend much time in gyms." 

The elevator doors opened on the twenty-sixth floor.  Alexandra heard the music immediately; it danced gracefully down the corridor from the open door of her apartment.  The Taiko drums rolled like thunder behind the melody, building and then fading like the roar of an ocean.  She followed behind the police officers until they reached the halfway point and then one of the men asked her to wait in the hall.

At the door to her apartment, both Police Officers spun away from the opening and unholstered their weapons.  A moment later they were gone, disappearing into the music pulsing from within.

"Jesus Christ," one of the men bellowed.  "Call for back up.  I've got Green over here.  Oh God.  Oh God. Call for backup."

* * *

Alexandra was not allowed back in her apartment for another week.  She spent that time at her ex-husband's house, smothering Melody with affection and stepping up her personal security over the child.  The newspapers told of a double homicide in her apartment, leaving the details just vague enough to encourage the masses to keep following the story.  When the police questioned her, they were far more descriptive.

Officers Muir and Green had been chewed apart.  "It looked like they'd gone through a fucking food processor, so you had damned well better be telling us the truth!"

The papers also told of a child that had been kidnapped from its crib.  The mother was currently being held for psychiatric evaluation and was considered the prime suspect in her child's disappearance because she could not convince the authorities that she really had seen a "monster" lashing a rope around her baby's neck and leaping from her sixteenth floor apartment balcony.

"Mommeeee," Melody cried.

Alex, lost in thought as two women pulled each others' hair on the Ricki Lake Show, leapt from the sofa and ran through David's house to find Melody cringing in the corner of the kitchen.  She'd been chased across the room by a tiny brown spider.  Alex crushed the spider to a stain with the sole of her shoe before sweeping Melody into her arms.

"I wan' go home," Melody cried into Alex's neck.  "It smells funny here."

"I know honey," Alex cooed.  She stroked her daughter's hair and carried her into the living room.  David's place did smell like a locker room, or more accurately a locker room with half a dozen pizza boxes fermenting in the corners but Alex had felt safe here.  Spiders were minor monsters compared to the thing that had visited her apartment.  A spider's bite broke the skin, not the bone and body beneath.

Alex would never take Melody back there.  "I thought we might visit Aunt Mary for a few weeks," Alex lied.  "I called her this morning and she's making up a room for you."

"The room with Barbie and Glitter?" Melody asked excitedly, suddenly forgetting that she had been crying.

"Yep," Alex said cheerily.  "And all the stars on the ceiling."

She had called Mary in Los Angeles and created a fiction about needing sunshine to finish her latest recording.  Seattle was too depressing a setting for Alex to finish her epic.  In reality, Alex knew she would never finish writing Mama Chen, let alone record it.

During the days following her encounter of the Piper, Alex began to understand it on some level.  The Piper was a musician; it felt rhythm and lived melody.  Music drew this creature, the music Alexandra had created as a tribute to her mother.

Though Alex had worked on the arrangement of the piece for months, the dominant theme had never changed.  That had always been the same; it had been the melody her mother had sung to her on that hot night in Seattle.  In her youth, Mama Chen, the subject of her masterpiece, had sung sweetly into the night in the hopes of bringing this creature into their lives.

* * *

When Alex walked into Mae Chen's house, she marveled at how well her father had ultimately provided for his family before dying the previous summer of a stroke.  They had scraped and suffered for so many years, but in the end, he had harnessed the American Dream and had brought prosperity to his wife and children.

"Mama," Alex called.

Mae Chen flew through the kitchen door in a panic of smiles, chatter and flapping hands.  "You home," she said.  "Where Melody?"

Alex studied the happy moon face before her and remembered that it had once gazed down on her and sang a lullaby through a mouth full of too many teeth.  "She's with David for a few days," Alexandra said.  "How are you, Mama?"

"Good.  Good." Mae Chen said heartily.  She led her daughter back into the kitchen and prepared them tea, which they drank in the sunny alcove with the view of Mae Chen's prized rose garden.

Alex stared at the flecks of leaves rolling around the pale green liquid and asked, "Do you remember the lullaby you used to sing to me?"

"I no sing," Mae Chen said, embarrassed as if Alex were making fun of her.  "No sing."

"But you did, mama," Alex countered.  "I remember you used to sing to me when I was going to sleep."  Alex cleared her throat and began to hum the dreamy melody. 

Mae Chen slapped her daughter hard across the cheek and said, "No sing."

The sting of her mother's blow echoed on her flesh.  Alex grabbed the old woman's arm and held firm while Mae Chen struggled.  "You called him," Alex charged.  "You called him to take me away."

"No sing!" Mae Chen cried before her voice rose into a piercing, trembling shriek, like an oboe played with a bad reed.

"How could you?" Alex asked.  "You were going to feed me to that thing.  How could you?"

Mae Chen's eyes shot around the kitchen as if seeking an intruder.  Her arm, no longer struggling, now trembled violently.  "He come?" she asked.

"Yes mother," Alexandra said, "he come.  I played your Goddamed lullaby and he came.  He wanted Melody."

"Melody no," Mae Chen gasped.

Alexandra watched her mother shrink.  The old woman's body seemed to cave in on itself, and the moon face hung low in shame.  "Why Mama?" Alexandra asked.  "Why didn't you want me?"

"You no understand," Mae Chen mumbled into her teacup.

Alex understood that her mother had attempted to call this creature to devour her like a morsel left on the walk for a stray dog.  She understood the Piper's hunger.  She just wanted to know why her mother hated her so much that she'd sacrifice her only daughter to this unwholesome God.

"Better to starve?" Mae Chen asked.  "Better sick all time?  You no understand.  Nothing in village.  Nothing in village.  And when Uncle bring here, nothing change.  Still starve.  Still sick."

"Did you call him for Joseph?  For Charles?"  Alex asked.  Had the woman been trying to sacrifice all of her children?

"No!" Mae Chen said, startled and offended.  "Never boys."

"So, you just wanted to get rid of me?" Alex asked.  A dull rage simmered near her esophagus, and she clenched her fists tightly, trying to keep from striking this miserable old woman.

"Boys different," Mae Chen mumbled.  "You no understand."

* * *

Alexandra returned to her apartment that afternoon.  Except for the physical remains of Officers Green and Muir, the room looked as it had on the night the two had been murdered.  Their blood still splashed the walls and stained the carpet.  A thick clotting, the size of an automobile tire, soiled the carpet just beneath her keyboard stand.  The walls were freckled and splotched as if Pollock had let loose his angst with blood.

She stared at the keyboard cautiously, thinking it might come to life with a hungry growl.  She turned the instrument on and began erasing every track she had stored in its memory.  After the keyboard, she erased the copies of Mama Chen she had stored in her computer.  She snapped compact disks with early recordings on them.  As each silver plate cracked, she thought of her mother and reduced their material to reflective shards.  Next she upended a storage case filled with cassettes and ground the casings under her heal until her floor resembled a funeral heap of plastic insects.  Brown threads, like entrails, snaked over the crushed black shells.

Somewhere there was a copy of this piece on mini-disc.  Alex sorted through dozens of the digital discs, but could not find the one labeled, Mama Chen.  It was probably in her car or her briefcase; she'd find it soon enough and destroy it as well.

Alexandra went to her closet and removed some clothes before going to Melody's room.  There she packed several changes of clothes for her daughter and searched for the book Melody had requested.  Alexandra found the copy of Where the Wild Things Are and shoved this in the bag on top of the clothing.

They would be taking a late flight to Los Angeles to stay with Alexandra's friend, the pianist Mary Cross.  Once they got the bloodstains off the wall and out of the carpet, she would have no problem selling her condo, and Alex would put distance between herself and the creature her mother's lullaby had called (and distance between herself and the crazy old woman who had sung that song over her helpless body).

Alex pulled off of the freeway and drove down the offramp four blocks from David's house.  She would take Melody to see her grandmother one last time before their flight.  Her daughter loved her "ganny" so Alex would not deny Melody this simple pleasure, though she wanted nothing less than to lay eyes on the vicious old woman herself.

The visit would be short, and with any luck, Mama Chen would be buried deep in the earth before Melody was able to travel back to Seattle on her own.

Her cell phone startled her, and Alex fumbled for the device.

"Hello," Alex said.

"Yeah," her ex-husband said, "It's David.  Where are you?"

"A couple of blocks out," Alex said.  "I'll be there in two minutes.  Is Melody ready to go?"

"Just waiting on you," David said.  "Look Al, you're more than welcome to stay here.  You don't have to jet off.  I'm supposed to start that gig with James in a week so I won't even be here."

Behind her ex-husband's voice Alex heard music.  A lilting melody danced over the sound of drums, roaring like an ocean's tide. Mama Chen, Alexandra thought.  The Piper.

"Alex?" David asked.

"David," Alex said with a trembling voice.  "Turn that music off.  Do you hear me?  You have to turn it off."

"Melody," David called.  "Turn the stereo down, honey.  I'm talking to mommy."

"Not down!" Alex cried.  "Off.  David you have to turn it off.  Do it now."

"Calm down," David said.  "It's a little rough, but it's a beautiful piece."

"Turn it off!"  Alex screamed.  She turned the corner onto David's block, her foot grinding the gas pedal to the carpet.

"Jesus, okay," David said as if exhausted.  "Hold on."

Another low roar of drums rose and then faded.  In their place the sound of a lone flute filled the phone's receiver.  David said "Yeah?"  A loud crash echoed over the line, and then the screaming started.  Alex's body shook violently.  She cried into the phone, adding her shrill, desperate voice to the chorus of destruction.

She drove over David's front yard and slammed on the brakes, the nose of the car only inches from the low stoop of stairs rising to the front door.  Alex shot onto the lawn and the wet grass nearly toppled her, but she managed to regain her footing and leapt at the stairs.

The inside of David's house was dark.  Shadows angled down the hall.  The stairs to the right of the foyer climbed into a black night emanating from the landing above.  Alex raced down the hall, listening for any sounds, listening for her daughter's sweet voice.

"Melody!" she cried. 

"Mommeeee," Melody squealed before the door to David's recording studio flew open.

The Piper had Alex's daughter slung over his shoulder.  His flute was secured behind the hemp of his belt and drew a line up the muscles of his abdomen.  His eyes burned green.  A pool of saliva spilled over his lower lip as it slithered into an expression between snarl and grin.

"Your due is paid," the Piper sang.  "Unless you'd care to follow?"

Melody squirmed frantically against the broad shoulder and screamed when her dress tore against the halo encircling the Piper's head. 

David's remains, like a tangle of soiled laundry, lay on the floor amid a spray of glass and electronic components.  His face had been hollowed out by the Piper's jaws.  What remained resembled a rotted apple, bitten through to the core and tossed aside.

Tears blinded Alex for a moment.  "Don't take my child," she cried. 

"I only take meat," the Piper countered.  "A child is loved, and love does not sing my tune."

"I didn't know," Alex said. 

And in that moment her mind emptied like a shattered glass.  She sprang forward and reached for the Piper's throat.  Her nails found his skin, but they tore back against the thick hide.  Alex screamed and grasped frantically for Melody, who kicked and squealed from her perch against the Piper's neck.

A paddle-thick hand wrapped around Alex's forearm and snapped the bones with a casual flick of the wrist.  Agony flared to her shoulder, and Alex spun away in a dizzying cloud of nausea.  The Piper left his place in the doorway, his footsteps the rhythm to Melody's shrill cries.  Alex reached out.  Her fingers touched Melody's, the soft flesh tingling on her skin, creating a twinkle on her flesh which spread up her arm and through her body.  The twinkling met the pain of her crushed arm in the chamber behind her ribs and they harmonized in a chant of anguish as the Piper pulled Melody away with two quick strides.

The last thing Alexandra Chen saw of her daughter was a tear sliding down Melody's cheek.  It fell from the smooth, innocent skin to continue its decent along the Piper's shoulder, eventually being devoured by the rough fabric of the beast's black vest.

Then, they were gone.

* * *

On a cool Spring morning, Alexandra Chen walked up the drive to her mother's home.  She didn't knock or ring the bell; she used her key and pushed the door open as she had done most of her life.  Alex stopped in the hall to look at the gallery of photographs of her brothers, her father, her mother.

In the kitchen, she filled the kettle with water and put it on the burner to boil.  Alexandra took the box of tea from the shelf and set it on the table in the kitchen nook, favoring the arm, which had never quite healed properly.  Next to the carton of tea leaves, she placed the mini-disk player, positioning the speakers to face the window and Mae Chen's precious rose garden.  She took the honey from the refrigerator and the sugar from the small porcelain frog beside the microwave.

Music should be wind… carry you away; not cave for hiding.

Her mother, Mae Chen, had told Alexandra this.  So when she heard her mother's voice calling to her from the end of the hall, Alex reached for the mini-disk player.  She pushed the button that would loop the track.  She called out, "In the kitchen, mama."

Then Alex pushed play.

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