Alias Hook Read online

  “No!” I yelped in my impotent outrage, only to see Alleyn wince in pain; one of his captors was twisting his fingers.

  “Yes,” I squeaked.

  Such whooping and confusion followed this utterance, I scarcely knew what I was about, but that the racking of my arms out of their sockets ceased, and Alleyn’s captors let him go. No such thing had ever occurred between us, of course, but my heroic delusion that my false confession had saved us lasted just until I saw the usher, the headmaster’s assistant, in the doorway, pursing his lips in a very worried look.

  “You heard him!” Carver crowed over the heads of the throng.

  And the chattering boys parted as the usher came to lead Alleyn away. The last look he turned on me was not angry, nor hurt at my betrayal, so much as resigned, as if he had expected no more. It stung worse than if he’d peppered me with invective.

  “Well done,” Carver said to me. He motioned to one of his toadies, a smaller boy clutching the muddy stick Carver liked to use at games, and nodded for him to give the thing to me. “Carry that for me, Hookbridge. Let’s go, men.”

  Teddy Alleyn was expelled the next day, collected in a carriage and bustled off the grounds. I never saw him again. But I was taken in by Carver and his mob. At first, I consoled myself that I’d worm my way into their good graces in order to wreak a terrible revenge on them all. But as time passed, I was glad enough to have traded a lie for their protection, bartered away my only friend for a pack of allies in petty schoolyard rivalries. They were wild things searching for a target for their malice, and Carver was clever enough to give them one, else they had fallen on each other.

  Alleyn’s weakness had forced me to perjure myself on his behalf, or so I convinced myself. How else could I bear what I’d done? Affection made a person vulnerable, and so I learned to mask whatever feelings might be seen as weak in myself behind a show of bravado, and advanced among their ranks.

  Thus my education began.

  Chapter Two

  LOST MEN

  Winds have been fractious all day, heavy weather for the Neverland. The boy prefers blue skies and bright sun. The blow is not so hard it disturbs the slovenly tilt at which my ship, the Jolie Rouge, has lain at anchor for two centuries, but there is reefing to be done, and yards to be swung and set so she rides more easily. My crew is eager for activity, but unskilled at the work, lubbers that they are, and I must do most of it myself.

  Fractious too are the men, much later in the day, when the breeze has slacked off. I go below to find a brawl in progress in the mess room, onlookers circling in to watch, hooting and braying. “Hey, foul!” yodels a voice above the din, to which another yelps, “Aw shut it, this ain’t the bleedin’ Marquess of Queensberry rules!”

  As I head into the melee, somone blunders into me out of the shadows, and my sword scrapes out on pure instinct, bloodrage erupting in my veins, and it’s only by the narrowest glimmer of reason that I prevent myself slicing open one of my own men, the big one they call Nutter. Stooping under the deck beams, face as crimson as his curly red hair, fists knotted beneath the tattered sleeves of his blue and white striped jersey, he’s rounding on an assailant who crouches low in the shadows. I whirl about as well as his opponent comes about, the gleam of a blade in his fist, and I recognize another of my crewmen. I leap between them before the small, wiry one we call Dodge can skewer his shipmate.

  Both men stumble to a halt on either side of me, Nutter held back by my hook arm, Dodge crouching before me at the business end of my sword. Fingers gripping his clandestine knife, eye purpling from a blow, he’s gauging if he might yet warp around me and strike home with his vicious little blade. His name is well earned.

  “Think again, Mr. Dodge,” I suggest. Did any of them bother to think even once, I’d swoon in ecstasy. “Consider the odds.”

  Dodge is a gaming man; I’ve seen him yowling over dice. He takes one step back, defiantly shakes a forelock of dark hair off his battered eye, but his weapon thumps to the deck. Good. I’ve no wish to be bled by that cunning device, a wicked weapon for its size, with a narrow blade that pops out with the flick of a switch. They are always bringing the damnedest things back with them from their world, my men.

  “Well?” I prompt.

  These men are not like my original crew, Bill Jukes and the rest of them, gone these two hundred years. This lot scarcely qualify as sailors, should that word imply the act of actually sailing anywhere, yet they are my responsibility still. Now the others fall back, give us room, shift about, eyeing each other for an advocate. My roving gaze picks out Filcher, my current first mate, shrinking into the shadows. Colorless hair straggles out from beneath his red bandana. His long nose, forward teeth, and shiny black eyes give him the look of a startled squirrel, uncomfortable in the spotlight of my glare.

  “Well, Cap’n, Dodge ’ere said the Addicks could whip Millwall,” Filcher begins, “and Nutter said ’e was full of shit.”

  Nutter growls at my shoulder, “Millwall could murder ’em!”

  “Millwall is a bunch of pussies,” Dodge croaks.

  “You’re the blee—”

  “Silence!” I bark. “Someone will explain this to me in the King’s English, or you’ll all tell it to the cat,” I add, with a suggestive flourish of my sword. It’s been ages since I flogged anyone, but these men don’t know that. Men don’t last for ages in my crew.

  “They’re clubs, Captain.” It’s Jesse who dares to enlighten me. The others set to nodding and murmuring; they know I give him more leeway than most. “Millwall and the Addicks,” he elaborates, limping toward me out of the gloom. “Football.”

  I gape at them all. “Football?” I try again, as if a different inflection might improve the taste. “Football?”

  This is what comes of idleness. The boy has not been seen much of late, off rounding up new recruits for his tribe, I suppose, but instead of luxuriating in this brief respite of peace, my men spend their wrath on each other. They want a nursemaid, not a captain. Some things never change.

  Look at them. Big, florid Nutter panting like a mastiff at my elbow, wiping sweat off his face with one fraying sleeve. Dark, spidery Dodge, at whom I nod to retrieve his weapon, snap it shut, and pocket it. Filcher, blinking his rabbity eyes in search of the nearest escape, every inch the Covent Garden pickpocket he was in his last employment, my mate by default, the only one aboard at present with even a nodding acquaintance with a criminal trade. They can scarcely remember their real names when they come here, yet the tribal rivalries of some meaningless sport persist in them still. And none of them, not even Jesse, whom I credit with a modicum of sense, had the wit or inclination to stop this fracas.

  It says little for the state of their world that my men grow more foolish with each generation. The boy will have them all writhing in Hell soon enough, yet they’re ready to murder each other now over a game. None of them would last five minutes in a fighting crew under sail in my day. They are Lost Boys still, the lot of them.

  The urge to send them to bed without their tea is all but overpowering, but the jest would be wasted on them. They already believe me half madman, that is why they obey me, but I mustn’t let them think me feebleminded. Before I can utter a word of dismissal, however, a mighty clang like Hell’s judgment trumpets from above. My men and I exchange a look of round-eyed alarm. Bugger me crossways, it’s the damned ship’s bell, silent for centuries at my command. Who dares to ring it now?

  * * *

  Flax, our newest recruit, stands at the belfry above the forward hatch; what’s left of the corroding bell rope has come off in his hands. As we all stream up on deck, Gato, my Spanish lookout, stretches out of the crow’s nest gesturing like a wild man, but a quick scan of the dusky sky reveals no warlike flying wedge of boys.

  “Oye, Capitan!” Gato cries, cupping his hand to his ear.

  Once I raise my hook for silence, I hear it too, a low rumbling of Indian drums, echoing down from the distant High Plains of the island and
rolling across the water, such relentless drumming as I have not heard in decades. It’s been ages since the tribes went on the warpath, not since the boy made them his pets. What’s got them stirred up?

  “Wot’s it mean, Cap’n?” ventures Filcher, at my elbow.

  I’m all but sniffing at the breeze, like a bloodhound. No, not the tattoo of war drums of old. There is something of excitement, almost anticipation in these drums, an allegretto con brio, not unpleasant, yet ominous in that it has never been heard before. Do I only imagine a rattling of fairies, a rippling of mermaids, something foreign, dangerous in the air? The boys are enchanted to sleep at night, but the Indians and the diabolical fairies are active at all hours, and we never know from what quarter a new game will be launched. Glancing back, I see all eyes turned to me as the distant, rhythmic pounding goes on and on. This is not the moment to lose my place in the text. Time to bring the clown Hook out of his box and rally these fellows to some purpose. What else am I fit for? Why else am I here?

  “It means we must stop and consider who our true enemies are,” I tell them smoothy. “Ignore them at your peril. A double watch tonight and a sharp lookout for war canoes, men. Jesse and Burley, for’ard,” and Jesse nods and limps for the ladder with my square-rigged bos’un, a fisherman by trade who actually knows something about boats. “Flax, astern with—” I peer back again at Dodge, his eye near swollen shut. “Needles!” I hail the sailmaker I spy lingering in the hatchway. “See if this man requires stitches.”

  A certain cure for malingering in my day, this has the desired effect, as Dodge mutters his, “Aye, Cap’n,” and hurries off to pair with Flax and move astern.

  “Nutter, you have the Long Tom.” And the big redhead clambers eagerly up the ladder for our swivel gun in the starboard bows.

  “It’s been long years since the redskins were foolhardy enough to attack this ship,” I begin again.

  “I say let ’em come!” howls Nutter from his gun, with the absolute ferocity of one who has never had to grapple in the mud and blood and gore for his life.

  “But if it’s Hell they crave so much, we’ll give ’em a taste!” I agree, and the men burst into cheers.

  It’s all theater here, illusion and flash-powder, from the moment they first set foot upon this cruel stage until their tawdry exit. Let them think I’ve engineered this event for their benefit. Anything but let them see I’ve no idea what the damned drums mean.

  * * *

  It begins with a bell. A rustling in the leaves that startles me.

  Don’t be afraid.

  Who speaks thus to the terrible Hook? I can’t tell; it’s gone dusky in the garden while I tend my irises. A new bloom of heartbreaking loveliness has just opened, its upper bonnet lavender, its lower petals deep indigo purple. A pale moon is already visible above the island, peering down on the curly cabbage leaves and ferny tops of parsnips and carrots, but the shadows have grown so long, I can’t see whose voice it is that speaks to me from the surrounding shrubbery.

  May I help?

  No one else ever labors willingly in this garden. And I need not say in words there is no other way to help Hook in this place.

  The stranger remains hidden from my view, but, as if speaking to my thoughts, the voice draws nearer. There is always a way.

  It’s as if one of my bearded flowers were granted the gift of speech. These are my most constant companions, these bulbs that regenerate themselves year after year after year; they know my thoughts better than anyone. They are my only refuge from the boy.

  Peter doesn’t know everything.

  I sit back on my heels, chilled; even stray thoughts about the boy can have dire consequences here, let alone unchecked words.

  There is always a way, the voice tells me again, quite nearby now. We can find it together.

  And I begin to perceive some subtle shift, some change in the very atmosphere, almost as if the attention of the Neverland were slowly turning aside, as if I am in the presence of some greater power. Greater than the boy.

  I reach tentatively into the shadows. “Take my hand.”

  The faintest grazing of skin on skin; another tinkling of a tiny bell; a fleeting impression of warmth and something more. Connection. Alliance. And for an instant, all of my senses respond to a weird lessening of the tension that always oppresses me here, borne off like a storm cloud on a freshening breeze.

  And I am no longer kneeling in the earth, but standing on board the deck of a ship. Too trim and responsive for the Rouge, no, it’s a fleet little craft under such a press of sail she seems to take flight, soaring up into the sky above a dark sea that sparkles like stars, bearing me aloft into the night. And my weary spirit soars as well, toward an uncanny moon gone as red as a sunrise, glowing like an ember in the night sky, lighting the way. Outward bound at last, it must be, deliverance at last, freed at long last from this awful place!

  And thus I come awake, aching for the rapture of release that never comes, to find myself still here, sprawled across my bed in my cabin on board the Rouge, still trapped in the Neverland, the nightmare that never ends.

  Who is it that haunts my dreams in this manner? Which of the hundreds of men I have led and lost in this place over time can it be?

  Or is it Death I dream of with such ardor? Who else can it be, this stranger with the power to end my misery? There is nothing else I crave so much.

  My stern cabin window tells me it is still dark night. I hear the tread of men on watch above, a mumbling of idle voices, the hollow clopping of dice in a cup, but the redskins’ drumming has slacked off. The sirens’ nightly wailing, however, is already at full throttle. I reach for my bottle to moisten my lips, but find it already drained and let it sink to the deck; then I roll over and grope about for a pillow to cover my ears and drown out the mermaids’ infernal noise. But in that moment, a renegade draft of air whispers overhead, trailing a mineral scent of sulfur and allspice across my bedthings. And piping along with it, another disembodied voice, feathery light,

  Seize your chance.

  What mockery is this? I haul myself up by the nearest bedpost, fumble out a flint at my little side table, strike a spark off my hook to light the lamp, peer about in the gloom. But my cabin is empty, of course. I sigh and rake back my hair, swing my legs over the side. I’ve had enough of dreaming.

  * * *

  The twin keyboards of my harpsichord grin up at me like rows of teeth in the flickering lamplight. The low, rolling pitch of the loreleis’ song adds extra menace to the night. I long to drown it out with the contrapuntal clarity of my instrument, voiceless, impotent, yearning for so long. The fingers of my left hand strike the first notes of a bright arpeggio. But the urge to sound a richer harmonic on the lower manual clashes iron against the wooden key, and the unpleasant thunk of the jack under my clumsy hook ruins all.

  “Play for your life.” That’s what she said. What mockery. My pointless life rattles along unabated, a runaway cart down a long and rutted road, two centuries and more since the boy chopped off my hand. Magic heals my interior wounds, but I’m no reptile; I can’t regenerate a missing limb. With a sigh, I edge my hook off the keyboard. Now I am only fit for playing games.

  I spiral up off the bench and pace round my cabin, lamplight glistening on polished wood, shimmering silks, far more lavish appointments than I ever kept at sea. Comfort matters to me now, a refuge from the world outside. But there’s scant comfort in the image I glimpse in my oval glass, even with my gruesome stump buckled out of sight in the leather cuff that holds my hook. Even now, I can scarcely bear to look at the stunted thing my hook conceals. Dead it may be, yet it sends me phantom feelings: the urge to grasp a hilt, or a joint of meat, or strike a chord, which can never be satisfied; a maddening itch where there’s nothing left to scratch. The scorching pain where he hacked my hand away tortures me often in the dark of night, beyond all soothing. Sometimes, when wine warms my belly and fouls my wits, I fancy there’s another withered stump, a twin to th
is one, inside my chest, that beats out of habit alone with only phantom feeling.

  Still I gaze, like a yokel gawping at a fire or a hanging or some other grim spectacle. Hard to believe I was reckoned quite the blade, once, tall, lithe, muscular, sky-blue eyes to make women swoon. Even now, I’m scarcely an hour older, physically, than the forty-odd years I’d accumulated on the day I sailed away from that blasted island in the Caribbees, when the obeah woman cursed me to this place. It’s a matter of sheer, stubborn pride that I carry my tall frame without stooping; he will never see me cowed. The contours of my body have been pared down to hard muscle over time, but my flesh is battle-scarred, my long, dark hair a travesty of the fashionable wig I once wore. The eyes peering back at me from the glass have lost none of their vivid blue, but they have seen too much.

  The muddled voices of my men waft down from above, a thin, indignant protest, a low gurgle of laughter, but nothing that sounds as if it might erupt again into violence or any kind of alarm. I sigh and turn away at last. My men.

  What is the spell of eternal childhood that they cannot resist? Women, music, theater, fruitful labor, the lure of the sea, the comforts of home and family, the delights of a garden, are there no such diversions in their world that might have rooted them in that place, where they belong? A dry internal laugh is my only response, from that irritating voice in my head that I can never quell of late.

  Might not the same be said of me?

  Chapter Three

  LONDON, 1702: YOUNG BLOOD

  A luscious display of womanflesh, ripe for the plucking, greeted us at Mrs. Ralston’s that evening. Most of the girls lounged in chemises, straps falling off plump shoulders, hems hiked thighward. One or two wore silken dressing gowns; haughty Marie arranged herself artfully on the divan in a plum-colored velvet overdress with no underdress beneath. In their arms, my friends and I would be received like conquerers, no matter what deficiencies wine had wrought on our prowess after a raucous afternoon at the playhouse in Drury Lane. Not all the finest acting in London was done upon the stage.