The War of the Flowers Read online

  The 1890s. By the time he read Hemingway for the first time, he would already have been at least as old as me.

  It also meant that the "journey from which there would be no returning" he was referring to in 1971 probably meant his own natural death. The sandwich and its little nest of french fries almost dropped out of the sky in front of him as the waiter hurried on to another table. Theo ate slowly, using only one hand so he could read.

  I have always been restless,

  the story began. In an earlier century, in the country of my ancestors, I would have perhaps been one of the fishermen who ventured far down the coast into the strange, foreign lands of Wales and Cornwall, or perhaps, given a slightly different cast of mind, a priest carrying the Gospel out into the small, scattered islands of the Irish Sea. Instead, I was born into a world where even the farthest reaches of Asia seemed nearer and more available to me than County Cork would have been to one of my great-great-great grandfathers. I valued the advantages of this smaller world, but even as a child I did not love what the growth of knowledge and the shrinking of distance had done to banish Mystery.

  Books were the sailing vessels of my childhood, taking me out of the wind-scraped streets of Chicago and carrying me away to Baghdad and Broceliande, to Sparta and Sherwood Forest. At times — for my childhood was not a particularly happy one, and not only because of poverty — it seemed to me that such places were far more real than the dull world of cobblestone and cement that surrounded me.

  There must be finer worlds, I decided, and set my own course in life without realizing it. There must be more than the chilly shadows of our home on Calumet Avenue and the rattling of trains overhead, twice an hour.

  Eamonn Dowd, or at least this perhaps entirely fictional version, ran away for the first time at age twelve, riding the hobo road as far as Denver before being caught by railroad police and sent back to Chicago, where his father beat him soundly but otherwise seemed to have little reaction to his eldest son's three-month escape.

  When he was fifteen he got away again, this time making it all the way out to San Francisco where, by lying about his age, he connived his way onto a cargo ship heading for China. The First World War had not begun and the ports of the Pacific were dangerous, exciting places; the young Eamonn eventually decided that, happily, Mystery was not entirely dead. He watched as a Japanese sailor who had knocked down an old woman was beaten to death by a mob in Hangchow, and had his first sexual experience with a prostitute in Kowloon who was only a little older than himself, a girl named First Rain who had run away from her farming village in Shensi. Dowd (or in any case the book's identically named protagonist) lived with her for some months, but eventually his wanderlust claimed him again and he took passage back to the States by way of a ship that stopped in Hawaii.

  By the time Dowd was marveling at his first hula dance — a much more sexually inspiring experience to a young man in the early part of the century than at its end — Theo had finished his sandwich and was on his second refill of coffee. Outside the restaurant, the cars had turned their lights on as the long summer afternoon dropped into evening.

  He riffled through the close-filled pages, skimming. The narrator had joined the navy when the United States entered the war in 1916. A year later he wound up as a cook on the USS Oregon, but since it was primarily a training ship he didn't see combat — he didn't seem sorry to have missed it, either. Afterward he had tried to settle in San Francisco where the Oregon was based, was even briefly engaged to marry a girl named Lizzie O'Shaughnessy, a dockworker's daughter, but his urge to travel was not so easily stifled. After leaving the navy he also left town in the mid-1920s. Several of Lizzie's brothers threatened to kill him if he ever returned, but presumably only for disappointing her: Theo didn't think Dowd would have gotten away safely if he'd impregnated a nice Irish Catholic girl and refused to marry her. He joined the merchant marine, traveling to Europe and Africa and the Middle East, always with an eye open for the sort of intrigue that in his childhood had fired his romantic sensibilities, and having adventures of which Theo could not help envying even the least interesting, if they were actually real incidents.

  Theo had finished his piece of coconut cream pie and was distractedly putting money onto the shiny tabletop, just about to close the notebook and head home, when the sentence at the end of one of the book's unnumbered chapters jumped out at him.

  It was while I was on shore leave in India, my pockets rather more full than usual, that I stumbled across the book and the secrets that would forever change my life.

  Theo wanted to keep reading, but had a nagging feeling he'd left the house's back door unlocked. He hadn't planned to be out so long. The lights were certainly off, since he had left in midafternoon — an invitation to thieves or vandals. Regretfully, he closed the notebook and walked out to his motorcycle in the parking lot.

  ————— Drinking himself to sleep with three or four beers was no longer as compelling an idea as it had been earlier in the day: he was enjoying, or at least interested by, his great-uncle's story. Theo propped himself up on the couch in a pool of light from a table lamp and left the rest of the lights off. For the first time he could appreciate the silence of the small house.

  The narrative — which despite its picaresque incidents had been to this point so realistic that he had begun to consider the book clearly autobiographical, despite its author's assertions — now took a turn toward the decidedly strange. Eamonn Dowd wrote of finding a copy of an infamous but unnamed book in a flyblown bazaar in Harappa, a discovery he described as "so lucky as to make one think more than luck was involved." Whatever the book was, it awakened in the narrator an interest in unspecified places that, like the book, he knew by rumor but had never thought possible to achieve — "magic names," as he put it, reached only by "lost tracks and highways which have mostly faded from the memory of mankind."

  As the story in the notebook got stranger, its descriptions also became more vague, so full of unspecific references to Eamonn's new fascination with "experiments" and "studies," as well as his growing interest in what he called "the Outer Lands" or "the Fields Beyond," that Theo found it increasingly difficult to maintain his interest in the rows and rows of close-set writing.

  He yawned and looked up from a passage about "the Gate, beyond which is the antechamber of the City and its fields," and saw to his shock that it was after midnight. Despite the purposeful obscurity of the narrative, he had been reading on the couch for over three hours. No wonder he was tired.

  He looked at the page where he had stopped, reading again the description of "a city beyond anything known, more alive than any metropolis of West or East, and more frightening."

  And now, at last I had found the way, or thought I had. At the next darkness of the moon I would find out whether my years of study had been in vain. I would realize my heart's desire or I would find my hopes dashed to pieces . . .

  Something moaned outside the house. Startled, Theo dropped the book. For a moment he thought it was a child crying, then relaxed at the realization that it must be a cat on the back fence, some neighborhood tom singing a song of territory disputed or love proclaimed.

  Those noises they make, sometimes — creepy little bastards . . . But as he found his place again and slipped an unopened utility bill into it as a bookmark, the noise continued, even grew louder. Theo's skin goosepimpled and the hairs on the back of his neck seemed to stand up and quiver. It was the strangest sound he could remember hearing, a moan like something in terrible pain, but oddly detached, too, with an eerily keening edge — the sound of something that knows it is terribly, irremediably lost. It unnerved him, and when he discovered that the patio light had burned out, it was all he could do to fumble the flashlight out of the kitchen drawer and step out the back door, wishing for one of the only times in his life that he had a gun.

  By the time he got outside the noise had stopped. He stood for a moment, holding his breath, wondering why what was almost cert
ainly the yowl of a horny tomcat had his heart thumping like a rave-track drum machine. There was nothing but silence now — even the crickets had gone still — but he could not shake off the irrational feeling that something had reached out for him, something even more alien than the cold presence which had touched him earlier in the day.

  Theo slid the beam of the flashlight along the back fence, across the dying flower beds he had again forgotten to water, and probed the undergrowth beneath the elm tree in the corner of the yard. No cat eyes reflecting. No sign of anything at all. He must be overreacting, he told himself, and it certainly seemed logical, even though he couldn't entirely make himself believe it. Whatever had made the noise had heard him coming and run away, simple as that.

  But the memory of that hungry, mournful sound had not left him even half an hour later. Tired as he was, he could not fall asleep until he had got back out of bed and turned on the little light in the hallway bathroom, so that the door of his bedroom became a faintly glowing rectangle in the darkness, a gateway to some shining country beyond dream.

  6 A CORRUPTION OF MOONLIGHT

  "My name ain't no goddamn Stumpy," the lost man said, even though no one was listening. He scooted even farther back into the corner, trying to get a little more of the dumpster between himself and the wind that was scratching around the mouth of the alley like a dog trying to dig under a fence.

  "Ain't Stumpy. That ain't no proper name." He patted his pocket, hoping that he had just imagined finishing the bottle, but of course he hadn't imagined it. "Goddamn."

  It wasn't right to take away a man's name. Bad enough when they sent him away to Viet goddamn Nam and took away both his legs and part of his arm, but at least back then they had called him by his right and true name, even put a rank in front of it, as if to stick him even more firmly into the world — Marine Private First Class James Macomber Eggles. The fellows in his platoon had also called him "Eagles" before a short round blew him back all the way from An Hoa to Stateside. "Eagles" may not have been written in his grandmama's Bible like his real name and all his brothers' and sisters' names, but he had still liked the sound of it. Even when he had first rolled back onto the street in his wheelchair, and some of the kids down by the courthouse lawn had started calling him Stumpy Jim just to see him get upset, at least they had still partly called him by his right name. Now they just called him Stumpy, and that made him angry, real angry. You could take away a man's legs and his arm, but you didn't take away his name. That wasn't right.

  "Where's that cat?" He had made a friend, of a sort, a scrawny thing that happily gnawed on his leftovers and huddled next to him for warmth, but he hadn't seen it for two days. "Damn cat run off." It had been nice to have some companionship. He hoped it would come back.

  It wasn't like he wanted so much. His cat back. A second sock to roll over the stub of his forearm, because it was going to get so goddamn cold when the winter came back and the stump always pained him so when the Hawk was blowing in from the lake. Someone to fix the skateboard wheels on his cart so he could roll himself up and down the sidewalk again properly and not have to drag himself around on a sliding mat of old cardboard. That was humiliating. He was a veteran — a goddamn Marine! He ought to at least have some goddamn wheels. It wasn't like he wanted much. And a bottle of brandy. Didn't have to be expensive, just a bottle of brandy that would go down his throat smooth and easy and make the other things stop hurting. He hadn't had any brandy since that man in the nice coat had given him half a bottle two Christmases ago, but he hadn't stopped thinking about it since. That stuff beat your bullshit cheapjack coughsyrup wine all to shit.

  He scrabbled through his pile of possessions, looking for the new plastic sack he had found, nice thick plastic from some uptown clothing store, not some raggedy-ass grocery store bag already splitting at the seams before he'd even found it. He was going to chew a hole in this nice new bag to put his head through, wear it high on his neck to keep the cold off at night. He thought it might look like one of those collar-things the astronauts had, the rings that their helmets screwed into, and he wondered briefly what it would feel like to sleep winter nights in an astronaut suit, with a little window over his face he could close and keep in the warmth until the morning sun began to put a little heat back into the sidewalks.

  Cat, sock, skateboard wheels, a bottle of brandy, and a goddamn astronaut suit . . .

  Something moaned quietly deep in the clutter piled at the end of the alley. The man who had once been Private First Class James M. Eggles flinched.

  "Cat? That you?" But it didn't sound like any cat. The noise was too big, too rough. They threw a body in there, but the poor bastard ain't dead yet, was his next thought. The pile of rubbish rippled, bulged, then settled. The moan became louder.

  Shit, no, it's just some goddamn junkie fall asleep puking in my alley. No respect. He pushed himself upright with his good arm and waved his stump at the quivering pile of cardboard and shredded plastic packing. "You get out of there." His voice was a little more shaky than he would have liked. "This is where a decent person sleeps. This is my place." But what if it wasn't a shriveled, bony little junkie? What if it was something worse, some kid waking up crazy with a head full of angel dust, his arms and face scratched bloody from his own fingernails, his muscles knotted up like live snakes? Or what if it wasn't even a person? Maybe a big old dog, one of those pit bulls, got bit by a rat with rabies or something. Maybe it's going to come up out of that pile of junk with its mouth all foamy and its eyes all red . . .

  "I got a knife, you know," he lied. Frightened, he still took a moment to add that to his mental list, right after the astronaut suit. "Don't make me cut you, hear? I don't want no trouble, but I'll give it to you free if you come looking!"

  The thing stood up slowly, a corruption of moonlight, a tattered, flapping shadow come to life. At first he thought that he must be more sheltered by the Dumpster than he realized, that the lakeshore wind must be blowing real hard to plaster paper bags and fast-food wrappers all over the other man that way, so that you couldn't see even a bit of his skin or clothing.

  The figure lurched a little and staggered a step toward him.

  "Goddamn it!" he said shrilly. "Now, I told you about my knife! You stay back!" But when it turned toward him — slowly, strangely, as though it had not heard a thing he had said, but had only now sensed him somehow, felt him or smelled him — he suddenly realized that it looked so strange because there was no body beneath the wrinkled, flapping assortment of bags and torn newspapers, no confused junkie face hidden behind the ragged clot of papers. The crumpled, grease-smeared mask was its face, the last face he was ever going to see.

  His heart climbed right up his throat like an Otis elevator, choking off his air. He turned away to drag himself away up the alley toward the sidewalk, scrabbling toward the people who must be only a few dozen yards away on the warm summer-night streets, the corner-hangers, the would-be pimps. Even the worst of his tormentors surely wouldn't leave him to this! He tried to scream, but a weight heavy as cubic yards of graveyard dirt fell on him and shoved him down, then something smelling of rendered fat and old bones wrapped itself around his mouth and nose, clamping tighter and tighter until James Macomber Eggles at last gave up his own tired, reduced body and went shrieking soundlessly into the void.

  ————— It had waited so long to feel this strange but pleasurable sensation again. Aeons in that cold dark place, in that nothingness inhabited only by other presences like itself, battening on the flickering heat of its unfortunate neighbors (while avoiding those few whose emptiness was deeper and more powerful than its own) had all but wiped away what little consciousness it had once had. Now it was free once more.

  But the freedom was not complete. A compulsion ran through it like a red scar: all its hunger, its chilly hatred of that which was warm and free, was centered around a dot of life that it could sense but not immediately reach — the theovilmos thing, the quarry. For a moment as it trav
eled to this plane, that quarry had almost seemed in reach, although the bodiless hunter had not been prepared to engage it. But such was the fierce fire of its hunger that for a moment the two of them had almost touched across incomprehensible distance. Then the irrha had been forced to let go, swept on to another point where the planes pressed closer together and it could more easily make its transition to the physical reality in which its quarry moved.

  The disease spirit flexed its new limbs, extended its new senses. Warm life surrounded it — warm life and cold geometries of stone, mixed together. So long, it had been so long since it had touched this material plane, felt these particular and exquisite pains. The irrha tried to look out the eyes of the stolen body, but could not at first make them focus. Its own peculiar senses were still sharp, though. It could taste other living presences close by, things much like the creature whose body it now wore: they were moving and making noises just beyond the mouth of this enclosure, innocent as birds flying past a branch on which a leopard pretends to sleep.

  It was time to begin the hunt, but the irrha hesitated. Something was wrong with this form it had usurped: it was somehow incomplete, the limbs foreshortened and unbalanced. The irrha had chosen this body because its owner had been close to the place where the irrha's crossing had ended, and because it had sensed the owner would not fight hard for it — the irrha had been depleted by its journey and in need of conserving strength, but it had turned out to be a pointless economy.