The piper follows up the French pentatonics by embarking on a solo sonata by a Thuringian provincial, hailing from somewhat closer to home, but still a virtual unknown to the local music-loving rodents. At the first arpeggiated tracings of A minor, the rats begin milling, rumoring among themselves. What is this? Here, at last, something one might learn from: the comprehensive architectural drawing, the crib sheet, the answer to the ancient question of whence evil, the touch that sense hungers for, quieting angst, reconciling crisis, finger-painting with balm the crests of industrial madness.
After a few measures, the rat hordes discover that they want nothing else but to be forsaken, to throw themselves away, to make love to their destiny, however awful the chapter and verse held in ambush for them. They ask only that the blow be swift and unmitigated, that completion come now, that it consume them in the beating forge, ravish them with answers.
The townsfolk, instructed in advance to stay behind doors, witness this epic theater of the absurd unfold outside their front windows. Rats begin slithering out into the open, assembling in groups of desperately adoring listeners across the town square. They push down into the expensive front-row seats that even the scalpers scrap for — anything to close the gap, press flush against the piper as he stands winding his inspiration. An adult human or two sneak out of their cottages with a grain scoop or meal mallet, sick with excitement to seize the weird occasion and bash in as many congregated rat skulls as possible before the encores. But a sidelong look from the piper is enough to send these forays scurrying back indoors.
Rats: Mammalia's abandoned and abused underclass, products of broken rodent homes, ladle lickers, cat killers, baby biters, pillagers and gnawers at civilization's tuck-pointing, mobile incisored havoc, random terrorists, surprise packages of plague. A parish of pestilence, a veritable national bank run of blind mouths! Who in Saxony would have thought rathood had undone so many? Each one an arrested psychohistory of criminal disfigurement, they pour out of hidden tunnels, shimmy down off roofs, come clean from hideouts of honor in church chancels to hear this: the sound of healing deliverance, delayed for so long, forever, the diminuendo clink of the tumblers aligning in the lock of divine plan.
They pack into the central square as if for an all-star, superband, gala charity extravaganza performance of the heavenly host's hall-of-famers: Live Revelation Relief; Apocalypse Aid. When all available standing room disappears, the vermin swarm the mezzanines and upper decks, buckling the balconies facing the market, clinging to the rotting timbers and gutters of the Rathaus. Overhangs and ledges fill with rats dangling precariously from shop signs and gables. Rats crawl over one another's shoulders, assembling in rat ziggurats, laying down a continuous, plush living shag four or five pelts high in places.
Sound rushes from their collective, forgotten past, music that spells out everything that will still befall their race, all races. A few of the more impressionable ones burst into tears at all that the modulations dredge up in them. Others shiver in rat-somatic euphoria, preening their reptilian tails, pointing their bristly snouts toward heaven in thanksgiving simply for having been alive for this moment. The astonished townsfolk cannot tell just what shared vision this carpet of cubic rat is granted. The solo flute transports them en masse into a promised place, a vantage point granting that privileged glimpse of blissful, universal design. Rat rhapsodic rapture: the vast, scattering sugar-and-grain mill of creation.
Seeing revealed tonal teleology play across a million pointy little snouts, several townspeople want to cry out to spare the creatures.
Others are filled with desire to rush out and join the doomed beasts, kneel down beside the enthralled throng. But no one does. The town's contract with expediency has been struck; it is too late to revoke, in any case. The piper turns his back on the assembled audience, producing a rumbling, aggregate rat-roar of protest. But he does not take the flute from his lips. The music persists, a constant circuit of peace passing all understanding locked into this endless circle of fifths.
The piper edges himself infinitesimally down the Osterstrasse, step by step toward the Weser. The crowd — no, the nation, the global confederation of rats — refusing to surrender what is here so excruciatingly close to deliverance once and for all, presses along after him in cold delight. Fortunately the streets have been cleared, roadblocked and flag-routed for this parade catharsis. The waves of wee timorous cowering beasts flow down the street-sluice toward the city walls, lower mammals molded into a molten flood, rats tumbling over rats, surging surflike in curlers and cleansing eddies. But the living flood admits to no shoving, no panic, no collapse of societal mores. Not a stampede at all; more of a dense, euphoric dance, cobbles pounded in time to the soaring tune, each figurant in the formation as certain of its precise measure as it is of this glorious, fading daylight.
They glut the length of the eastern avenue, packed tighter than dead leaves in autumn or mud in spring. The road becomes a single, continuous file of suppliants on their way to some unimaginable rat holy site. When it dawns on the front ranks of entranced dancers just what potter's field they are posting off to, only the slightest momentary objection ripples through the column. Distress passes; courage revives. Flute lilt reveals just how untenable their rattish existence had been until the covenant hidden in this little turn of phrase came to release them. Sarabande assures each quivering whisker that they are now linked to a destiny far preferable to any softer, safer end.
All the way up to the very banks of the Weser, even when the piper stands aside and nothing but the murderous flow of rapids remains between the avant-garde and their arrival, hesitation is briefer than thought and more easily dispatched. The lead rats expand into the watery sacrifice required of them. No bill too great to pay, and, with a gnawing smile, given the payoff. They rear up, plunge into the waters like, well, like lemmings. Happy, even, to go down, half in love with a resonant death, provided they can still hear the promissory sounds and sweet airs buzzing about their tiny ears until the moment when the current closes above them.
Realization at last ricochets through the ranks of animal caravan. No word travels quicker than fulfillment. Alarm backtracks through the flow faster than the flow can advance on it. Thus the rats at the back of the queue, not so much pushing as happily piling on, out of earshot of the fatal tune, could easily call upon innate survival instincts and save themselves. It would take no effort at all to break off, turn back from disaster, return to town and begin the difficult work of restoring the decimated pest populace.
But not one rat does. An even greater urge keeps them promenading almost gratefully, for three quarters of an hour, into a river from which not a single forepaw reemerges. Yes, a mother pauses here or there along the bank, thick with plunging bodies brown, and an occasional old retiree breaks into uncomprehending tears as he takes to the drink. But all choose this moment of crystalline clarity, receiving it willingly as opportune, a godsend really, far preferable to a return to the quotidian misery and ignorance that have marked their lot until that moment. It takes no bravery to listen to the soul-stilling music and make peace, put an end to experience. No courage, no strength at all aside from joy.
The last corpulent rat in the miles-long parade plunges into the water with a sort of snappy salute of thanks to the piper, who only then stops playing. No sooner does the primordial musical lure break off than the sole survivor recovers his sapped equanimity. Reviving at the last possible instant, he surfaces, rights himself in the current, and with his last full measure of devotion pilots his battered body downstream to Ratland, where — the reason he was spared — he prepares a manuscript account, this firsthand report on the proximity of ecstasy to horror.