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Show 43 Chapter 7 The town was quiet in the darkness when, weary and numb, I made my way back to the bakery. At the end of summer, sometimes, you will find a piece of fruit which looks wholesome enough on the outside, smooth and sun-ripened. But when you bite into it, the inside is full of decay and tastes rotten and moldering. That was the way I felt that night, as though inside my skin all my being had gone spoiled. It wasn't the killing of the rats that bothered me so much. Rats are vermin. They destroy things and they bring filth and disease. If they aren't driven out and killed, they breed until they cause misery, as they had done in Hamelin. So it wasn't the rat-killing that sickened me, but the cruelty and brutality which had come over all of us. The ordinarily good-natured children of Hamelin had turned wild and vicious on the banks of the Weser, and Gast was to blame. There was evil in Gast, and worse, he knew how to bring out evil in others. I could see that he used people for his own designs, and he had used me most of all. That night I made up my mind that I would have nothing more to do with him. I would avoid him like the devil, which I half believed he was. Yet while my mind said that I must never see him again, my heart yearned to be back with him the way we were before the killing. I don't know whether I slept that night but I doubt that I did. I was up before the sky had lightened, measuring out the flour and |