I sat there with her one night, though Terrence said I was a fool. “We all were!” I’d told him. I’d forgotten how cold night was, outside, as if the heat just dropped out of the day and you could touch the stars.

We heard the vines. Not the uneven whisper of the wind, but something moving through them. Carefully. Quickly. We waited. Then Amelia—the grocer’s wife—turned on the torch.

For a heartbeat the light showed massed pale leaves, glittering thorns and between them a darkness with two shining yellow eyes. A long, blackened arm, skeletal, stretched a clawed, clutching hand to the dish. Then it hissed at us.

I ran, towing Amelia. She had to be sent away after that. The store closed.

“It was a feral cat,” said Terrence.

Billy Pinnicke said, “It was that piper’s animal. It’d be getting hungry, nothing left but bugs and casserole. No one saw it with him when he left.” But no one was certain they’d seen it when he arrived, either.

The world forgot we’d ever had a school. In Woodwild, it felt as if the vines had grown inside our skulls. We’d never get past them. No kiss could fix that.

The few students who’d been sick, or smoking up in the creek, were sent to boarding school. Their parents didn’t stick around long. The grocery store was already closed. The mayor looked like he’d aged twenty years.

The town was failing when Old Pinnicke drove in with the grocer’s gold chain in his pocket. He’d been checking traps deep in the scrub, and one of his dogs had found it. Everyone knew that chain, swinging off the grocer’s hairy chest while he bent over, wrapping cold groceries in newspaper to keep on long drives.

The police investigated. They went into steep country and gullies. They found dying stands of lantern-bush, sheep bones, cattle bones, rusting carcasses of cars. They went right into the caves. I heard a rumour they found a cavern nearly beneath the school, the stone white in light filtering down through knotted roots. Nothing else.

I don’t know if they looked for Darryl. He never showed his face in Woodwild again, but I reckon he didn’t go far. He’d taken his chance to spy out the land; more than once I saw him drive by me on the roads. The nerve of the man. But no one wanted to know. I suppose if once they started questioning the piper, there were too many other things they’d need to start believing. Other people they’d need to start blaming.