The War of the Flowers

by Tad Williams

  Yeah, but be honest — it wasn't much of a life, was it? "We have been talking a long time and I am weary," Dowd announced. "I use several unnatural means to keep this crippled body functioning and I have not taken advantage of any of them recently. Also, to be honest with you, I did not sell half my vitality to raise an irrha to fetch you here just so I might tell you what nice people your true parents were. In any case, there are things in my own story you must hear first."

  Theo didn't have the strength to argue. The weird warehouse room had begun to seem like the setting of some existentialist play in which he would stand forever listening to a disembodied voice telling him about how miserable and pointless the universe was. "Yeah, okay. Go ahead."

  "Very well. The morning of my banishment came. The marshals of the Parliamentary Guard came to take me to Strawflower Square, which was almost deserted. Rumors of impending trouble between the ruling houses had inclined some of the more powerful families to stay home, and in any case my so-called crime and trial had been a bit of a nine-day wonder — there was more exciting gossip on the wind now. Only a few ordinary working fairies passing through the square dallied long enough to witness a mortal being sent back to the mortal world.

  "My sentence was read by a minor Parliamentary official — he had not even bothered to put on a formal coat. A doorway, a gate, whatever you wish to call it, was opened and I was thrust through the fiery seam with no more ceremony than a bag of rubbish dropped down a chute. I took nothing with me but the clothes in which I had arrived in Faerie, my notebook, and, on a necklace underneath my shirt, a charmed stone given to me by the Remover — a sort of signal beacon, as I understood it. The doorway closed behind me and I found myself back in San Francisco — in Golden Gate Park, in an open meadow where I terrified a pair of tramps by appearing out of nowhere. I imagine the after-effects as having been something from an old newspaper cartoon, with both of them swearing on the spot to give up alcohol forever.

  "In any case, I found myself in the middle of a bright California day after how long away I could only guess. Longer than I suspected, as it turned out. I had been gone perhaps three or four years by my own reckoning, but something like twenty had passed in the mortal world. When I had left, the Second World War had only recently ended. Truman was still the president. Now I had returned to an America that was unhappily embroiled in Southeast Asia, at war in a country called Viet Nam. Richard Nixon, a man I only vaguely remembered, was the president. The nineteen-sixties were just ending and the entire world I knew had been reshaped like an image in a carnival mirror.

  "I did not know all this at the time, of course, and if things had gone the way I planned I would never have learned any of it. "A bit overwhelmed, I wandered over to the park bandstand and thought about what I should do next. Every time a couple walked past pushing a baby carriage on their way to the aquarium or the Japanese tea garden I had to fight down the impulse to simply grab the child and run. I didn't have long, you see — I had to accomplish my task before the next sunrise if I wanted the Remover to be able to use the stone around my neck to locate me in the mortal world, or at least that is what he had told me. Perhaps it was a lie — certainly the stone had a darker purpose, as I discovered. But the fact was, I was in a panic, finally coming to realize how difficult this task would be and knowing that if I failed I would lose any chance to see my beloved Erephine again.

  "The more I thought about it, the more obvious it became that I could not simply snatch any child. For one thing, I could not substitute the Violet baby — you, Theo, yes — for the stolen child until the Remover put him into my hands. I had to arrange things so that everything could happen in one place, at one time, and I could not afford to attract attention until that moment for fear I would be arrested and lose any chance of getting back.

  "I had not really thought the problem through in all its intricacy during my last distracted hours in Faerie. Now, faced with half a day in which to come up with a solution, I walked across the park and considered my plight. I kept moving — I certainly did not want to wind up in jail as a vagrant — and eventually wandered over to the post office in my old neighborhood in Cole Valley. I knew that after twenty years most of the mail waiting in my box would be meaningless, but I still had no idea of how I was going to proceed with my real errand, so I was more or less killing time. The account I had set up at the Traveler's Bank before crossing over to Faerie had done its work and the post office box was still mine. I had a sack of mail waiting — a very small sack considering it had been twenty years, but the era of junk mail was only beginning — and I went to a diner to read it over a cup of coffee. There were a few letters from fellows I'd sailed with and a few from gals I'd known in various ports. Some business mail as well. And then I found it, three months old but incredibly timely — the birth notice."

  "From my mom and dad," Theo said flatly. "From my niece Anna and her husband, yes," said Dowd. "Your adoptive parents, so to speak. I still remember it. A son, seven pounds, ten ounces, named Theodore Patrick Vilmos.

  "I won't draw this out. I can imagine that it's painful for you. I thought simply of calling up, inviting myself to their home down in San Mateo for a visit — what more natural for an uncle only just returned to town than to want to meet his niece and her husband and new baby? — but I was more than a little worried about what could happen if something went wrong. Also, I was close to two decades younger than I should have been, because of the differences between time in Faerie and in the mortal world, and I was afraid that would make them suspicious — make them think I was some impostor. There's irony, eh? I didn't want them to think I was some dangerous stranger because it might hinder me from stealing their child! So instead I took a cab to the Traveler's Bank in Russian Hill, which you must have guessed by now is a place that has long catered to those who travel to Faerie or other strange lands, and withdrew a decent sum of money, then took a taxi all the way down the peninsula to San Mateo at the cost of a small fortune. I located the house and then walked the neighborhood, waiting for it to get dark. When night came I watched Anna and her baby through their back window from a tree in the yard of an absent neighbor. I didn't feel very good about what I was doing, needless to say."

  Theo was feeling sick to his stomach again. It was like having someone stick a finger right into his memories and smear them around: nothing was what he had thought it was. "Just . . . tell. Tell what happened."

  "You may well despise me, but remember, I was desperate. Besides, I thought little Theodore would be going off to Faerie to be raised by a good family, that my niece would be getting prime fairy stock in return and that she would never know a change had been made. You see, the Remover had explained to me that there is a sort of . . . melding that happens when a changeling is substituted for a human baby. Both take on something of the other's essence. The changeling baby takes on the semblance of the mortal child during the first night as it lies in the crib and the mortal baby, even at a distance, is changed in subtle ways as well. They are linked like Siamese twins despite their separation."

  "So I look like what the real baby would have looked like?"

  "Not exactly, but quite closely, as far as I have been able to discover."

  His mother's sad little deathbed confession floated up from his memory. "She did know."

  "What?"

  "My mother knew. That I wasn't real . . . that I wasn't really hers." Eamonn Dowd seemed distracted and uneasy, but not because of what Theo was saying; in fact, he hardly seemed to be listening. "Yes, well, I should finish this explanation. Time may be shorter than I thought."

  "What does that mean?" Dowd went on as though Theo had not spoken. "At midnight, after I used the charm to make myself visible to the Remover, a shining gate opened and a shrouded, masked figure appeared at the foot of the tree with the Violet infant — you — in its arms. It was not the Remover. I still do not know who or what it was. Some other poor fool tricked into doing the Remover's will, using his one trip to th
e mortal world on a visit that lasted only minutes. Feeling like a murderer, my heart racing, I went to the basement window that I had noticed was unlocked, crawled through, then brought the Violet baby up the stairs and into the house. I could hear Anna's husband snoring. I took Anna's child out of the cradle and put you in — it was most strange, I could already feel you beginning to change even as I laid you down, a kind of . . . sliding sensation . . . but I was too breathless with anticipation and fear to pay much attention. I hurried out through the back door with my niece's child. As I stepped out into the yard a hand reached out and touched the Remover's stone dangling on my chest. I had time only to shout in pain at the shock that ran through me before I found myself tumbling helplessly to the ground.

  "A terrible coldness overtook me, and something else as well, a sensation so strange I still cannot describe it except to say that I found myself rushing away from myself at right angles. Suddenly I was floating in the air like a soap bubble, looking down on the scene in your parents' back garden, which included my own body lying curled on the grass. I can't tell you how strange it was to realize that I was not inside that body anymore. The masked stranger handed the stolen baby through the gateway to what must have been, I can only presume, the Remover waiting on the far side. Then the stranger came back. He pulled the stone and its chain from the neck of my lifeless body and I found myself drawn after that stone as he headed back to the gateway — the stone was pulling my bodiless essence with it!

  "I had been a fool to forget Faerie's natural laws, and especially that they were as literal as in any folktale. The Remover had sworn to bring the baby and me back across the barrier, but he had not promised how he would do it. The Remover clearly meant to fulfill the letter of the contract — it is always perilous not to do that here — in the only way he could, which meant leaving my body behind and dooming me to roam Faerie as an unhomed spirit.

  "But chance intervened. Someone had heard my cry of surprise and pain. Peter Vilmos opened the window and shouted at the shadowy figure. I wonder if he saw the doorway to Faerie and if he did, what he made of it. Did he ever mention such a night? Ah, no matter. Startled, the Remover's lackey dropped the stone and its chain in the undergrowth near the shining gate. Your stepfather was shouting about the police now and the doorway to Faerie was already flickering. The masked stranger hesitated for a moment, then abandoned the magical stone and dove through, making his escape back to Faerie. As soon as the gate closed I found myself back in my body again. I managed to drag myself to my feet and locate the stone — in my bodiless form I had seen its fall quite clearly — then pocket it and climb over your step-parents' fence. I was still disoriented by my experience and must have looked like a hapless drunk. Certainly I barely made it over. By the time I had crashed through the hedges into the next street I had recovered my wits enough to know that I would never escape the neighborhood on foot — the police had undoubtedly already been summoned. I found an empty garden shed and shivered there until just before dawn, then headed back to San Francisco, full of despair. I had been double-crossed. I had betrayed my own kin and received nothing for it. I was never going to see my love Erephine Primrose again.

  "If I'd been a bit mad before, it was as nothing to what I went through in the days that followed. If I hadn't had money in the bank, I'm sure I would have died in a gutter somewhere, another derelict killed by the cold. But I did have money, so I took a hotel room, then later an apartment, living modestly so that I would not have to find a job and take time away from the obsession that drove me. To my neighbors I must have seemed merely a distracted and solitary man, but truly I was no longer sane. I was consumed with one thought — somehow to return to Faerie and Erephine. Oh, yes, and most definitely to get revenge against the creature who had betrayed me, the Remover of Inconvenient Obstacles, not to mention the master and mistress of Primrose House and all their lackeys in the Parliament. Such fantasies I had! They made the terrible things that Hellebore has done look tame.

  "Other than the books and artifacts I had collected before, which had been waiting for me in storage for all those years, I had only one thing to help me, one very large clue — the charmed stone the Remover had given me, the thing which had brought his henchman so unerringly to me and which had somehow briefly separated my essence from my body. Faerie has very strict natural rules, as I have said, and anything used in that sort of magic — for that sort of science, as they would say — bears some traces of its user.

  "It took me several years to discover a way, a very dangerous way, that I could turn the charm-stone to my own use. The search was hard, hard work, particularly because many of the sources I needed to study were scattered widely around the world. So during that time I reasserted my identity somewhat, disguising myself to seem closer to the age I should have been and re-establishing myself as traveler and a student of curiosities who was also a respectable member of the community. Not that all of my sources and contributors cared about such things, of course. Some of them had led far stranger lives than mine. You would be astonished, Theo, to learn the number of people — well, some of them only look like people — who hang about on the fringes of the mortal world trying to get back into Faerie or one of the other, less well-known destinations.

  "In any case, I had found what seemed to be my only chance to return to New Erewhon. Still, the odds were not good, and when I sent that letter of apology to my niece Anna, the letter you have read, I truly believed I was likely to die. Perhaps it would have been better if I had."

  Theo had been standing for too long, shifting from foot to foot. He was tired and, now that the worst of his terror had worn off, even a little hungry. But more than anything else he was beginning to be very angry. His entire life — a life that had seemed a little pointless anyway — was now shown to be largely the outcome of other people's plans, other people's needs. "Yeah, maybe it would have been better," he said. "So what happened? How did you get to be a . . . to be the way you are, where you won't even show yourself? And more important, why am I here at all? Why did you send that zombie-thing after me instead of just allowing me to be a happy thinks-he's-human idiot back in my own world?"

  "I am giving you answers, Theo, but only because I wish to do so. You act as though you deserve them — as though it is your right." The voice had gone ice-cold again. "You are a typical American of your time. You believe the universe should have rules, like some board game, that cheating will be punished and virtue rewarded. Nonsense. That is nonsense."

  Theo took a few steps into the middle of the room. "I'm tired of talking to the air." "Come no farther!" There might have been a touch of fear behind the fury. "Your ferisher friend is hostage to your good behavior, Theo. I was never really your uncle, remember, so do not presume too much on family connections. We are not even related."

  Theo could not help himself — he laughed out loud in shock and anger. "Family connections? Shit. You took me from my parents, stole my stepparents' real baby, all for your own selfish goddamn plans. I don't think I'm really the one who's taking advantage of family connections, am I?"

  After a pause, Dowd spoke again in a calmer voice. "I am trying to tell you what you want to know, Theo. Please, just listen. You're not the only one who finds this hard."

  Theo waved his hand angrily, directing him to continue. It was pointless to argue, everything was decades in the past.

  But it's new to me. "To be brief, my experiment succeeded, although not the way I had hoped. I crossed the barrier, but in a way completely unlike what I had experienced before . . ." Eamonn Dowd had now begun speaking a bit more quickly. Theo thought he seemed nervous and distracted, and wondered what he had done to make Dowd fretful — certainly he couldn't have expected anyone to take news like this cheerfully.

  Actually, all things considered, I've been pretty damn calm so far, and he sure seems like he's holding all the cards, anyway. So what's his trip? What's he afraid of? Theo squinted at the shadowed corner. Maybe he's like Oz the Great a
nd Terrible. Maybe there's something about how he looks — who he really is — that he doesn't want me to see, and all this "I'm so ugly" stuff is just a cover. He began to move slowly forward under the guise of restlessly shifting from foot to foot.

  "It did not take me long to discover what the strange thing was that had happened to me," Dowd was saying. "I passed over into Faerie — but not all of me made the trip. Just as the Remover had planned for me earlier, I traveled as a disembodied spirit. Whether my actual body died at that moment or only when I had been out of it a certain time, I don't know, but I knew I was leaving it behind forever. I cannot tell you how dreadful that felt and I will not try.

  "I found myself here in this place, but not precisely the place that you are seeing now. I can offer no better explanation than to say that in my bodiless state I saw a larger version of the Remover's house — a version that opened out into planes of existence I had only suspected to exist. My God, how little most people guess! And at the center of it all, in the middle of his web of intrigues and experiments, the Remover of Inconvenient Obstacles sat like a multi-dimensional spider. A barely imaginable hatred swept over me. I had no mortal body anymore, so I became that hatred. Here in front of me was the creature that had cheated me and stolen my hope! Like a dog who has long been tortured by a vicious owner, and whose confining chain finally breaks, I could think of only one thing — Attack. Destroy.

  "I took him by surprise, I think, and that helped. Whatever he truly was, the Remover was certainly powerful and much better schooled than me — even with surprise on my side I would have had no chance except that in the place where we fought my fury was a pure thing, a powerful thing. It is also possible that, in the way peculiar to Faerie, his own breaking of his promise to me weakened him. He had not brought me back from the mortal world as he had sworn he would — his lackey had made a mistake. If he had done so and then killed me or left me to roam bodiless I doubt it would have rippled even the quietest side-currents of reality . . . but he had not fulfilled his bargain. In Faerie, such things have a price.