Alias Hook Read online

  How his life must have changed in town, a country lad with a clubfoot, who couldn’t run with the other boys. But I’ll wager he could fly as well as any of them when he dreamed himself into Pan’s tribe. No wonder the buried memory of this place called him back.

  “I reckon it very highly indeed,” I tell him.

  He glances at me briefly, and I glimpse in his eyes the pleasure of a man not accustomed to praise. These men do not expect intimacies; they want only commands from me, the more horrible the better, but I would inspire his confidence.

  “Julius Caesar was an epileptic, you know,” I observe. “Given to fits. One of the greatest generals who ever lived.”

  “Yeah?” Jesse eyes me again. “Fancy that.”

  “I’m shifting your battle station to the quarterdeck,” I tell him, nodding at his pistols. “You’ve earned it.”

  “Aye, aye, Cap’n,” he grins.

  * * *

  “Hey, lads, look at me, I’m an Indian!” Flax cries, holding up a fistful of black and blue-green duck feathers behind his blond head.

  Sticks lent them a makeshift worktable of spare planks set up amidships, near the deckhouse, and the men are happily plucking and skinning their two coneys and Jesse’s fat duck in the open air, where the stench of flesh and blood is not so burdensome.

  “I’m a bunny rabbit!” guffaws Nutter, grabbing the skin of the hare he’s pummeling and waving the ears over his head.

  “You’re a horse’s arse, is wot you are!” jeers Filcher gaily, swatting Nutter across the face with his own coney hide. They are all bellowing with laughter now, as more fur flies than in an alley full of cats. They are grown in size when they come back here, but scarcely mature, by even the most lenient definition. It cannot be possible that any of these fellows ever attempted matrimony with a female.

  * * *

  “I’ll tell you what I know, Captain,” Parrish greets me. “It’s not much.”

  She’s put the basin of water I sent in to good use. Her hair is clean, the color of cinnamon, falling in loose, bouncy waves nearly to her shoulders. Her skin is pink with scrubbing, pale and fragile next to her grimy outfit. It’s more breathable in here since I had Brassy dump out her shit bucket, and she perches on her bunk holding a tankard of dark, steaming liquid in both hands. She’s hardier than she looks if she can stomach Brassy’s evil brew in the middle of the day. I ask her how she finds it.

  “Absolutely vile, thank you,” she replies, fine, cobwebby lines crinkling up around her dark eyes. “But addicting in a loathsome sort of way.”

  It’s the first time in ages anything has made me laugh in the Neverland.

  One corner of her mouth tilts hopefully up. “Somebody’s busy out there,” she adds conversationally; now the hunters have ceased their foolery, I notice how Sticks’ hammering echoes across the ship, even down in here.

  “The men like to be occupied,” I say, spying an old barrel amid the debris in the corner. “Casks, and the like.” The less said about the true nature of my carpenter’s labors, the better, and I roll out the barrel, seat myself opposite her, and invite her to continue.

  “Well, Peter turned me down, back in the nursery, as I told you,” she begins. “No amount of whining on my part could move him, and off he went. I was devastated. I just collapsed, weeping, and I cried myself to sleep, or passed out, or something. That’s all I remember until I woke up here, on your ship.”

  I shake my head. “What is the fascination for Pan in your world?”

  “He is youth and joy and innocence, all the things my world now craves,” she rhapsodizes.

  “He is sorrow, guile, death,” say I. “You venerate a phantom.”

  She peers at me quizzically. “No,” she insists, “an ideal.”

  I frown. “And you remember nothing else, after the nursery?”

  “Nothing that makes any sense,” she sighs. “Dreams, I suppose. Have you ever had a flying dream, Captain?”

  “Never!” I snort.

  “Well I must have had one. But it was all jumbled up, lights, color, a roar like the ocean.” She’s pursing her mouth, trying to think. “I rather remember trees, a forest. Animals in cages?”

  This last is a question, and I nod.

  “They looked so sad, I thought it was cruel,” she says. Then she frowns at me. “Were there men? Somebody had a gun.”

  “We found you in the wood,” I remind her.

  “Oh, yes. So you said.” She’s chewing her lower lip thoughtfully. “I don’t remember anything else. Except the noise. A kind of pounding, like a drum, or something. It went on forever.”

  I keep my expression composed. Was she already in the wood the night of the redskins’ infernal drumming? Did they drive her off for the same reason the imps thwarted her last night—because she was coming too close to the boys?

  “And you still believe something called you here?”

  She nods, her expression more intent. “It must be a boy needing a mother, don’t you think? Maybe not Peter, but one of them. Perhaps some other lonely boy regrets his decision to run off to this place.”

  It must be a powerful need to draw her here in the teeth of so many obstacles. Unless it is all part of her diabolical punishment for committing some crime against a child.

  “And you left your charges behind in the nursery?” I prod carefully.

  “I’m not the most conscientious governess, I suppose,” she agrees, with a wry little smile. “But they do have a proper nanny to see to them. I was just an affectation of their parents, a governess after the war, when few families could afford such things. Very Jane Eyre,” she adds with an arch of her brow. I know not how to respond to this cryptic remark. She sits back, watching me. “Have you really been here two hundred years?”

  “At the very least,” I sigh. “I may have misplaced a few decades here or there.”

  “How is that possible?”

  “How do boys fly?” I grumble. “How do fairies exist?”

  “Magic!” she gushes.

  “Dementia!” I counter. “Mass delusion. Folie à deux, as the French say, multiplied to an infinite degree.”

  She grins. “Well … you’re remarkably well preserved.”

  “I am positively pickled.”

  “Um … you’re not a ghost, are you?”

  “If I’m not make-believe, I must be spirit?” I raise my hand before her, the one with which I shoved her against the wall of this cabin, the one with which I helped her up from the floor of the Fairy Dell, and she looks a little abashed.

  “Sorry, Captain. There’s a lot to take in.”

  “You don’t believe in me?” I fold my arms in pretended injury. “I fear you’ll be disappointed if you expect me to vanish in a cloud of vapor. That’s not how it’s done here.”

  She takes another draft of Brassy’s barkwood poison, studying me, trying to decide what to believe. “Well, but, in the stories, they say you served with Blackbeard.”

  A cackle of laughter escapes me. “Served? I knew Teach, but I was never so great a fool as to join his crew.”

  Her fingertips rise to her mouth, her dark eyes ready to pop. “You knew Blackbeard? Oh, this is too much! Either I’m completely mad, or I’m having the best dream ever! Well, what was he like?”

  “He was a maniac. Drank black powder in his rum and lit candles in his own beard when he boarded a prize, to impress upon his victims exactly what sort of a lunatic they had to deal with. He slew whatever got in his way, friend or foe, drank himself into severe states of delusion, and took out his rage on his own men, whom he mistook for demons. Blast me crossways was I ever witless enough to sail with Teach!” She looks utterly thrilled. “Do you mean to say they still speak of Teach in your world?”

  “The most ferocious pirate of them all,” she nods vigorously. “He’s considered rather romantic.”

  “I can think of no less likely a figure of romance,” I reply dryly. “Except the Pan.”

  * * *

&n
bsp; “How come she’s still here, is all I’m saying,” rumbles Nutter through his beard, fingers worrying the edge of a card, his curly red hair a halo of flame in the light from the lamp on the table.

  The others round the table grunt in assent over their cards and rum. I edge closer behind one of the derelict guns, listening from the shadows. I’ve just come from totting up our supplies in the galley, when I heard their covert muttering around their mess table, those men not on watch above. It’s less stifling below in the dark of night.

  “What good is she?” Nutter demands.

  “Maybe she can teach Cookie not to poison us,” Jesse suggests, folding his cards.

  “She’d ’ave to be a bleedin’ miracle worker, Jess,” snorts Filcher, rolling a couple of coins into the little pile on the table between them all. Those men who lack coins or notes have staked other objects procured from some forgotten corner or other: I spy the glint of a gold ring, the sheen of an ancient rope of pearls. Objects of no practical value to them in their present circumstances, but venerated out of habit for the presumption of status they confer. That little silver bell I saw in Parrish’s cabin, polished to a fine sheen I recognize as Brassy’s handiwork, has already joined their pot, although my steward is no longer in the game.

  “Females be better off in the kitchen or the salting house than on the boat,” comes Burley’s soft Cornish brogue, as he slides a note into the pot.

  “Or in the bedroom,” young Flax chimes in.

  “How would you know?” Nutter guffaws, closing giant fingers round his cards and making to cuff Flax about the head.

  “I know!” the youth protests, elbowing off Nutter’s blow. “And then they want the earth, and you’re trapped. Then all you hear is ‘Do this, do that. Grow up.’”

  “Women are trouble,” agrees Filcher, who likes to portray himself as a fellow of some dash when I am not about. “Cap’n oughter give ’er a good poke, like any other piece of tail, and ’ave done with ’er.”

  Tail, trull, cunny, twat, snatch, tart, slattern, cunt, slut. I have heard them all, every rude name for the female sex furtively bandied about in this messroom for ages, although the braver the talk, the less acquainted with experience it tends to be among my men. They have little enough use for women, these fellows; the only females ever seen here are the little Wendys.

  Nutter’s outstretched paws devour the pot as I retreat into the shadows. Of course, now and again one of the Wendys takes it into her head to reform me. The boldest among them seek to practice their infant wiles on me in retaliation for the boy’s indifference, for soon enough they learn they are mere gamepieces to Pan, and children love revenge above all things, even girls. Especially girls. So they think to make a trophy of me, a black and sinister plume in their pert little caps. But they are infants to me, scarcely out of their christening gowns, however hard they strain at the bit of childhood. There’s naught to do but laugh at them. They are not even any use to me as hostages; over long time I came to realize the challenge of a rescue only goads Pan to more inspired savagery against my men.

  One menacing slash of my hook is enough to send the little chits screaming off home to their own mothers. Or I let them glimpse my horrible handless stump, gruesome enough to defile their dreams all the rest of their lives. No one gazes upon my deformed stump, not my men, nor the Pan, nor anyone in the Neverland, but by my design, and only when I want to see them pale in revulsion and horror. That is how to deal with a Wendy.

  It strikes me so suddenly, I nearly trip over the nearest gun carriage. My men were all Lost Boys once. What if Parrish was a Wendy? I should never remember myself, they all look alike to me, but suppose it was the Neverland itself that called to her, as it calls to my men? She would not remember; they never do, once they return to the world and grow up. But that may be why her instinct to mother the wretched boys is so strong. Did she once live in the wood at the boys’ secret lair, might she not carry within her some vestigial memory of how to find it again?

  * * *

  “I’m sorry, Captain,” Parrish sighs, grasping the last stake and skittering down the bottom of the trail to hop to the sand below. “I’ve wasted your time.”

  She readjusts the bill of the sailor’s watchcap over her pinned-up hair against the angle of the sun, dusts off her checked smocked shirt, both items culled from our slops chest to give her the look of any other anonymous pirate. Although we needn’t have bothered. A fruitless hour in the wood brought us nowhere near any boy, let alone any phantom voice calling out to her.

  “No harm done,” I grunt, stepping down into the sand behind her. I sweep off my black hat, wipe the sleeve of my hook arm across my forehead, set my hat back on. From under the brim, I peer again at the stand of roses a few paces away, still blooming brilliantly in the noonday sun.

  “Still, it was kind of you to bring me back here,” she says.

  I make a noncommittal nod. She fair leaped at my offer to escort her back in the daytime, when the malevolent fairy presence is not so keen, and the boys’ childish minds are awake and active. It was a risk, but Hook and a single pirate seeing to their traps are unlikely to arouse much suspicion, or interest, or so I hoped. And the reward should have been incalculable had the connection she sought reeled her in to the boys’ hidden lair. But she was unable to pick up the trail of her dreams.

  “It’s so odd,” she goes on, as I usher her past the roses and down the strip of beach to where the skiff is once again tied up amid a great sprouting of weedy vegetation. “The feeling was so strong when I was in London, I dreamed of nothing else, but now that I’m really here…” she shakes her head. “I don’t hear it any more.”

  “We’ll flush ’em out next time,” I sigh, moving ahead to claw aside a patch of scrubby weeds above the boat. But when I turn back, Parrish has come to a halt in midbeach, staring at me.

  “You’re using me to find the boys!” she exclaims. “That’s why you were so eager to come back here!”

  “Madam—”

  “You bastard! You thought I’d ‘flush ’em out’ for you! Oh, my God, I’m such an idiot! I can’t believe I fell for it—”

  But before I can even think of a plausible lie to defend myself, a faint, rapid glittering of light against the stony blue-gray of the cliff above the roses behind her draws my attention. And rising over the cliff top, comes that most dreaded silhouette. Parrish turns in midcry and sees him too, falls silent, standing as if mummified, staring up at that ominous shadow.

  “Peter,” she whispers.

  I’d not be surprised did she bolt away, run up the beach, seek his protection, but she stays rooted in place, staring. Without thinking, I lunge to grasp her arm and drag her down into the shelter of the weeds and scrub that shield the boat. The greenish fairy light comes bouncing down above the rosebushes as Pan circles down for a closer look. Scowling, he flies all round the bushes and their rainbow blooms. He does not land, as if afraid to be contaminated by the renegade sand that spawned them. The fairy light throws out a little shower of saucy sparks, rusty gold and green.

  “See, Kes?” Pan cries to his imp. “Knobby was right! But where did they come from? Who dares to plant them here?”

  The imp shrills something indecipherable.

  “But they’re not supposed to be here,” the boy rounds on her. “I said so!” With another menacing look all about, he adds, “Something is very wrong…”

  And I’m on my feet before my impulse can confer with my brain, striding up the beach, intent on herding them away from Parrish; his imp never leaves him unprotected if I’m about. The fairy swooshes to Pan’s side, shimmering with menace, and I pause some little distance away.

  “Hook! What are you doing here?” Pan growls at me.

  “Merely strolling along my beach,” I say innocently.

  “My beach,” the boy insists, quite as agitated as his fairy.

  I respond with the slightest shrug of indifference. “Then they must be your roses,” I observe. “Charm
ing!”

  He flutters higher in a fury of paddling limbs. “This better not be your doing, Hook!” he shouts.

  “You are master here,” I remind him smoothly. “It’s your beach, after all.”

  Playacting composure is my habit with the Pan, but beneath it I’m fascinated. I’ve never seen him so thwarted over so little, a nothing, an innocuous patch of flowers. I’ve never seen him thwarted at all.

  He glares at me stormily, his imp glimmering in the air between us, ready to charge in either direction. Then the boy glides up a little higher and makes a sweeping gesture toward the roses.

  “Here’s what I think of your charming roses,” he cries. He swirls his hand in the air, and I wait for the roses to disappear in a burst of fairy light. Pan is not a sorcerer, as far as I know, yet all things in the Neverland bend to his will. But instead the rose petals begin to fade to the colors of sand and rock, curl up like parchment, fall to the ground. Green leaves yellow and shrink into themselves, disintegrating like ashes. Rose hips droop on their naked stalks and wither into dry husks until the weight of each one snaps off the twig supporting it. And when all that remains is a bramble of blackened stems and naked thorns, the boy nods his head, and the entire stand of withered sticks crumbles to dust before my eyes. Dust. He doesn’t command them to vanish; he commands them to die, while he watches with venomous pleasure. His keen gaze shifts to me to see the effect of his will, although I’m careful to keep my expression impassive.

  “I win!” he cries, but his words are more hollow than usual. He was too piqued to call a game, so I owe him no forfeit; perhaps he hopes I’ll crumble in despair like the cursed roses. His imp seems eager to herd him away, and he flutters up to go, but at the last moment turns again to me.

  “Whoever did this will be very sorry!” he shouts crossly. “I better not find out it was you!” And off they soar over the cliff.