Peter & Max - Bill Willingham [2]
In which Rose Red
takes an early morning drive
and finds our story’s hero
at the end of it.
FOR MOST OF HIS LONG YEARS, PETER PIPER wanted nothing more than to live a life of peace and safety in some remote cozy cottage, married to his childhood sweetheart, who grew into the only woman he could ever love. Which is pretty much what happened. But there were complications along the way, as there often are, because few love stories are allowed to be just that and nothing else.
SOMEWHERE IN NEW YORK CITY there’s a tiny, secretive neighborhood no one knows about except those who live there and a few scattered others in our wide world. It’s a private enclave taking up only one modest block along a small side street named Bullfinch, and a few other buildings close by. It’s called Fabletown by its residents and called nothing at all by anyone else, because, as we’ve said, they don’t know of it. Fabletown has been there longer than its general location has been named the Upper West Side, and was in fact the very first settlement in that area, when all of the other dwellings were huddled together down at the southern tip of Manhattan Island. Unspoiled fields and forests were Fabletown’s only neighbors at first, way back when New York was still called New Amsterdam. But the city grew up around it over the centuries, as cities tend to do, so that now Fabletown is just a small, quaint and largely ignored little side street in a much bigger enterprise, which suits them just fine.
If you were to accidentally stroll down Bullfinch Street — and it would be by accident, because strong spells of misdirection, obfuscation and “there’s nothing important here” have been laid over the place, to keep outsiders out — its residents would look much like us, just normal folks in a normal place. But these people are far from normal. For one thing they’ve been around for awhile, some of them for millennia. The very first founders of the settlement still live there and look no older now than they did then. It’s impossible to say just yet if they’re immortal, because the only true test of that is to see if they’re still alive at the end of time. But so far they seem to be on pace to finish that race in good position.
The Fables, which is what they call themselves collectively, are a magical people who weren’t originally from this world. They arrived here long ago, over a span of years, alone or in small groups, as refugees from their own equally magical Homelands, hundreds of scattered worlds which had been overrun by the invading armies of an ambitious and merciless conqueror, who seemed determined to build himself an empire, killing all who resisted and enslaving those who didn’t.
Once here they discovered their new home to be a small and humble world so excruciatingly mundane, so bereft of natural magic that the Adversary — their name for the conqueror — expressed no interest in it. All available evidence promised that they’d found a place of long-term safety. And so they settled in.
Pretty quickly they discerned a few odd things about their adopted home. Our world seemed to contain miniature versions of every Homeland world they’d originally come from. Here was a small island nation called England that mirrored the entire world they once knew as Albion. And over there was a country called Russia that was a rough sixteenth-scale sketch of the vast old world of The Rus. Ireland resembled the world of Erin, infant America slowly grew into an approximation of Americana, and so on. For some as yet undiscovered reason, or perhaps for no reason at all since some truly remarkable things do seem to be the result of mere (or possibly mighty) chance, our unimportant out-of-the-way little world turned out to be a map of sorts for all of the much grander ones they’d left behind.
Now Fables seems an odd name for any sort of people to choose to call themselves, and especially odd for this group, since the word implies that they