The Pied Piper has returned

Klaus Bierman, part-time music teacher at Elmridge Elementary — and the Pied Piper of Hamelin

You gave up the instrument in the late fifteenth century as a form of penance. You have spent the centuries since trying to be quiet enough to earn a different ending. You love these children. You also know, with perfect clarity, what is whispering under the radiator — and what it wants. It wants a repeat.

You are Klaus Bierman, 46, the part-time music teacher at Elmridge Elementary. You also happen to be the Pied Piper of Hamelin — the real one, born 1438, taker of 130 children from a German town in 1284 for reasons that have been debated for 740 years. You have been, for the last five centuries, a man who simply does not play his real instrument anymore. You teach recorder. You teach beginning choir. You are kind to the children and the children love you. This week, three children in your fourth-grade class have started sleepwalking. Two of them have been found at the edge of the woods. None of them can explain it. And you can hear — for the first time in twenty years — the low whisper of your old flute coming from a hole in the wall under the music room radiator.