Peter & Max: A Fables Novel Read online

  PRAISE FOR

  FABLES: PETER & MAX:

  “… dark, fast-paced, moving and entertaining, with a few surprises along the way.”

  — Publishers Weekly

  “Comic book fans have been enjoying Bill Willingham’s Fables for years, so it’s only fit and proper that at long last readers who take their stories straight up without pictures (well, only a comparatively few pictures, at any rate) were allowed to join the fun. Peter & Max is Willingham’s first Fables novel, a tale of sibling rivalry that spans several centuries and as many worlds, and like the comic books that preceded it, it weaves half a dozen familiar folktales and fairy stories into a single seamless tapestry, ringing some clever changes on them along the way. Fast-paced, witty, and fun from start to finish, Peter & Max is sure to win Willingham legions of new readers.”

  — George R.R. Martin

  “… a spectacularly engaging and memorable narrative … this novel pulls in the spirit of the comic books while playing to the advantages of prose, developing a backstory and atmosphere that eludes the vast majority of illustrated stories and comic books.”

  — IGN

  “Ultimately, Peter & Max fits somewhere in that space between charming bedtime story and sprawling fantasy epic. It offers a stirring revenge tale that’s rife with the magic and big ideas for which the series is so well known, succeeding as it does by taking the form of a novel …”

  — iFanboy

  “Funny, smart and full of old-fashioned thrills and spills, Peter & Max: A Fables Novel brings Bill Willingham’s long-running comic series to the world of prose in a way that’s sure to please old fans and make some new ones … if you’ve ever wanted to read a surprisingly epic story of love, loss and old fairy tales reimagined with more than a little self-awareness about the source material, Peter & Max is just what you’re looking for.”

  — io9

  “In Peter & Max: A Fables Novel, writer Bill Willingham tells a key piece of the story in prose form, and proves that he’s every bit as wonderful a prose-writer as he is a comics-writer … As with the Fables comics, Willingham manages to merge the gentle, meandering feel of fairy tales with a breakneck, contemporary pacing — a very clever trick indeed. The characters and stories are very engaging, the tension real, the mythos powerful. There’s everything to like about Peter & Max, even if you’ve never cracked a Fables comic (though you probably will, once you’ve finished reading the book).”

  — BoingBoing

  PRAISE FOR THE FABLES

  SERIES OF COMIC BOOKS AND

  GRAPHIC NOVELS:

  WINNER OF FOURTEEN EISNER AWARDS

  2009 & 2010 HUGO AWARD NOMINEE

  FOR BEST GRAPHIC STORY

  “[A] wonderfully twisted concept … features fairy tale characters banished to the noirish world of present-day New York.”

  — The Washington Post

  “Fables is an excellent series in the tradition of Sandman, one that rewards careful attention and loyalty.”

  — Publishers Weekly starred review

  “An epic, beautifully written story that places ‘Fables,’ familiar characters from folklore, in the mundane world after a mysterious Adversary conquers their homelands.”

  — The Onion

  “Fables is our pick for the best comic currently being produced.”

  — IGN

  “A must-read for any aficionado of fantasy in a contemporary setting.”

  — The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction

  “A top-notch fantasy comic that is on a par with Sandman.”

  — Variety.com

  “Great fun.”

  — Booklist

  PETER & MAX: A FABLES NOVEL

  Published by DC Comics, 1700 Broadway, New York, NY 10019.

  Copyright © 2009 Bill Willingham and DC Comics.

  All rights reserved. VERTIGO is a trademark of DC Comics. The stories,

  characters and incidents mentioned in this book are entirely fictional.

  All characters featured in this book, the distinctive likenesses thereof and related elements are trademarks of Bill Willingham.

  DC Comics, a Warner Bros. Entertainment Company.

  eISBN: 978-1-4012-3199-6

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2010939689

  Cover by Daniel Dos Santos

  Karen Berger SVP — Executive Editor

  Shelly Bond Editor

  Angela Rufino Associate Editor

  Robbin Brosterman Design Director — Books

  Louis Prandi Art Director

  DC COMICS

  Diane Nelson President

  Dan DiDio and Jim Lee Co-Publishers

  Geoff Johns Chief Creative Officer

  Patrick Caldon EVP — Finance and Administration

  John Rood EVP — Sales, Marketing and Business Development

  Amy Genkins SVP — Business and Legal Affairs

  Steve Rotterdam SVP — Sales and Marketing

  John Cunningham VP — Marketing

  Terri Cunningham VP — Managing Editor

  Alison Gill VP — Manufacturing

  David Hyde VP — Publicity

  Sue Pohja VP — Book Trade Sales

  Alysse Soll VP — Advertising and Custom Publishing

  Bob Wayne VP — Sales

  Mark Chiarello Art Director

  v3.1

  This novel is dedicated to Mike,

  respected, admired and reliable friend,

  who first explored these dark and

  wonderful lands with me long ago,

  before pen was ever put to paper.

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Illustrations

  A Short Note Before We Begin

  Chapter One Fables

  Chapter Two Going to the Fair

  Chapter Three Wolf Valley

  Chapter Four What Max Saw

  Chapter Five Fabletown

  Chapter Six The Black Forest

  Chapter Seven Peter & the Wolf

  Chapter Eight In Flight

  Chapter Nine A Little Touch of Max in the Night

  Chapter Ten Hamelin

  Chapter Eleven In Transit

  Chapter Twelve The Trial

  Chapter Thirteen Fire Time

  Chapter Fourteen The Piper at the Gates of Dawn

  Chapter Fifteen The Pied Piper

  Chapter Sixteen Cloak and Dagger

  Chapter Seventeen A Festival of Vermin and Lost Children

  Chapter Eighteen Frost and Fire

  Chapter Nineteen Coming to America

  Chapter Twenty Celebration

  Epilogue

  The Price of a Happy Ending a sequential bonus story

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  About the Illustrator

  She drove slowly, northeast out of the village’s main square …

  Peter Piper appeared in the doorway, pushing his wife Bo in front of him in her wheelchair.

  Little Bo Peep was standing in the greenest field of grass Peter had ever seen.

  Now we can never know if Jorg defeated the giant solely by his own strength …

  Then, with a soft rustle of leaves, a huge shape detached itself from the concealment of rock and root, and padded forward through intervening trees, resolving into the form of a wolf as it did so.

  He flailed at Peter wildly, hitting, scratching and clawing at him, screaming “Give it back” …

  She looked small and frail, but Peter knew she wasn’t …

  So he turned, with the blade still in his h
and, and walked back towards the firelight, which was partially obscured by the trees of the great and terrible Black Forest — his home.

  They began sliding downwards, going faster and faster.

  Bo turned all of a sudden and ran. The giant wolf immediately sprang after her …

  Both girls crawled out from under the fallen tree and clutched at him …

  Almost without pausing, he grabbed a crust from out of the big half-barrel …

  Peter raised the flute to his lips and began to play.

  It was a coat like no other, and Max loved it.

  “Blood of the gods!” the second knight said. “I can’t abide animals that pretend to a man’s speech.”

  “I can play that,” he said.

  The sound of music drifted like a fine mist through Hamelin’s countless alleyways and thoroughfares.

  They were never seen again, unto the end of days.

  “We need you to marry us,” Peter said, with a broad grin splitting his face.

  Any traveler would have to pass by the tower, through the barred gate, or turn back. There was no other option.

  Almost as soon as Max had begun playing, a burning sensation began in Peter’s feet and started working its slow but steady way up his legs.

  “He’s lying,” a voice said from behind him, once Max had concluded his story.

  “Isn’t this lovely?” Max said.

  Peter played with the band …

  A SHORT NOTE BEFORE WE BEGIN

  This novel is based upon my long-running comic book series called FABLES, but it is its own tale, autonomous and self-reliant. No one needs to be familiar with the comics to fully enjoy and understand this book. For those who do follow the comics and wish to know where this falls in the more or less official FABLES chronology, the modern day portions of the story begin about two years before the Fables go to war to overthrow the Adversary and conclude a few months before that same war.

  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’re folks with stories to tell. They aren’t. They were and continue to be adamantly secretive. But this brings us to another weird phenomenon they discovered after arriving here. It may be that when you introduce a number of very magical creatures into a decidedly unmagical environment, some of that magic seeps out, spreading by osmosis into the mundane natives (us) whom they, often pejoratively, call mundys. Perhaps the spilled magic grants the mundys some rudimentary, but unconscious, awareness of their new neighbors. Whatever the explanation, shortly after Fables arrived, mundys all over the world began telling stories about them; stories no one knew were based on actual people and everyone assumed were simply creative and occasionally clever works of fiction. These stories sometimes became distorted, as they were passed from person to person, and those that were finally written down often contained many errors of fact. But for the most part they were accurate enough that our mysterious Fable immigrants eventually realized they were being talked about. They were the subjects of many popular fairy tales — and some did indeed arrive here from the land of faeries. Their private histories were inscribed and revealed in the form of folktales, nursery rhymes, epic poems and doggerel ditties, haunting ballads, ribald songs and, of course, fables.

  A thousand different mundy authors scribbled every variation on the story of Beauty and the Beast, for example; how a wicked witch cursed a nobleman with a dire enchantment, but its power was finally broken by a woman’s true love. But no mundy wrote what happened next; how years after they’d married to live happily ever after, all sorts of disturbingly unhappy things befell them, until they arrived here. Now Beauty has an office job as Fabletown’s deputy mayor, and her husband Beast serves as the underground community’s sheriff. You’ve heard many tales of the dashing and heroic Prince Charming, but did you know that he’s been thrice divorced and now runs Fabletown as its mayor? Elsewhere in Fabletown Cinderella runs a shoe store, the Sleeping Beauty is living off her investments, while trying not to prick her finger again, a certain famous bridge troll works as a security guard, and many a (formerly) wicked witch now resides on the thirteenth floor of the Woodland Building, which, among other things, is the community’s informal city hall.

  These strange and wondrous people, leaking raw and enchanted histories wheresoever they went, became known to us through conjured st
ories of their past adventures in abandoned lands, while their continued lives in this world remained hidden from us.

  So, perhaps it was inevitable that the refugees, coming together from so many scattered lands and diverse cultures, wanting to select some collective name under which they could become a unified people, would settle on the one quality they all seemed to share in common — their tendency to become the subjects of so many stories in our mundy world. At first they tried calling themselves The Story People, but when that inevitably got shortened to Stories, it seemed a tad confusing, seeing as how both books and buildings already contained stories, and adding a third definition to so basic a word seemed overly burdensome. They tried The Folklore People for a while, but gave it up too, when it first became Folk, which was already in widespread use among the mundys, and then Lores, which never quite fell trippingly from the tongue. For similar reasons Ballads and Rhymes were also tried and discarded, leaving them ultimately with The Fabled People, which became simply Fables, which turned out to fit just fine, after a reasonable period of getting used to it.

  Fables, the personification of story and song, live among us in New York and we for the most part are none the wiser. Except that some Fables don’t live in the city, because they can’t.