Alias Hook Page 4

  Why do so many come back here? Cast out of the Neverland as boys when they begin to grow up, they find themselves at odds with the other world; the dream of Neverland, however faded, haunts them still. Some dormant part of themselves beyond the grasp of memory must cry out in sleep for the tribal society of a childhood they can’t even remember and the comfortable tyranny of a leader. With the willfulness of the children they were, they dream of this place with such ferocity that Pan brings them back; perhaps he senses something familiar in the tremor of their dreaming that he has known before. But they are no longer boys and have forgotten how to fly. Pan soon chases them off to wander the Neverland as homeless outcasts, which leads them to me. Where else can they go? They were half-pirate anyway as boys, with the Pan directing their blades to any target he chose.

  Are they sorry to call Pan their enemy? Certainly not. None of them remembers exactly that they were ever his creatures. They’ve simply been bred to follow a leader, and any leader will do, so long as their thinking is done for them.

  We send the shrouded figure over the side, weighted down with a length of chain so no errant swell will keep it afloat, and gaze into the last of the ripples that tell where the corpse has gone. The men are sober but dry-eyed in the face of this finality, certainly untouched by the envy that consumes me. Perhaps one has to grasp at life as lustily as I once did to appreciate the majesty of death. I neither expect nor require a good death for myself; it may be as hideous as he likes so long as it is permanent.

  This is what I am, what I’ve become in this place: handmaiden to the dead. My last, my only desire is to one day be rewarded for my centuries of service, earn my own passage into the Kingdom of Hades, and be allowed to rest in peace. But I am aged Charon ferrying the souls of the damned to the Underworld where I can never follow. The obolus has yet to be coined that will purchase my passage out of this never-ending Purgatorio.

  Until now. Perhaps. I glance again at Jesse. Can I but muster the wit to seize my chance.

  * * *

  Last night’s drumming has long since ceased, nor do any war canoes blot the pristine blue bay, so I order Burley to make for the island. Our timber supplies are low on board the Rouge, and subject to damp and wormrot, but I have in mind to erect some sort of breastwork for Jesse to shelter behind if he’s to be effective. I try not to find the silence ominous as we tie up under the rushes in a shallow inlet beyond the northern end of Pirates Beach, a barren expanse of rock, sand, and scrub grass at the base of a bluff. A steep path has been worn into the face of the bluff over time, a goat trail amid the bristling shrubs and bramble that marks the boys’ territory. I’ve had stakes driven in along the trail so Jesse may climb more easily, and we claw our way up, eager to work off the sobriety of death, emerging at last into the outer reaches of the wood.

  Yesterday’s winds have wrought some havoc here. A few entire trees are down, those most derelict with age, bark peeling, roots exposed, shrubs and bramble flattened beneath them. Many more branches litter the ground in confusion amid the pines and twisted scrub oaks. Odd to find such damage right here in boy country, but a boon to my plans, to stumble upon so much felled wood ripe for the taking—although it occurs to me now we’ll have to go back to the Rouge for saws and axes to hew it into lumber. Which thought no sooner crosses my mind than I notice a more than usual squawking of birdlife and rumbling of earthbound beasts from the dark interior. As if the Neverland itself can hear the subversive plan in my head.

  “Let’s check our traps,” I call to the men, a bit too loudly, by way of subterfuge. And I herd them away from the green, grassy, jasmine-scented path that leads into the heart of the wood, where the fairies dwell, and into a neglected thicket on the periphery where we set our game traps, where the Indians, who have the lion’s share of the great wood to hunt in as well as their own buffalo plains, rarely bother us. Yet we go in stealthily, clawing aside more fallen limbs, all of us alert to some nameless tension in the air.

  “On your guard, Jess,” I murmur.

  He shuffles up beside me, teeters for a second on his clumsy foot, rights himself with a fleeting grin of apology as my hook arm shoots out to steady him. The maimed and the halt. “The blind leading the blind,” I cannot help but mutter.

  “Mind the ditch, eh?” he agrees, sliding out his pistol. I gaze at him sidewise, absurdly touched by the small, shared jest.

  Shafts of daylight stained piney green glisten between the tree trunks, and as no shaggy predator rustles up out of the shadows, I dispatch the others to fan out ahead for our traps. We leave them yawning open under bushes and nestled between tree roots, small wooden cages, canted and weighted with painstaking precision to spring shut when the bait is taken.

  “This one’s empty,” calls Burley, bending over a patch of reddish bramble. “The door be open, but the bait’s gone.”

  “Same here,” reports Flax, at a stand of rocks overgrown with weedy shrubs, some distance in the other direction.

  I’ve never known coney nor quail could unlatch a trap door once it’s eaten its fill. Is this some new game of the boy’s to starve us out? Hand on hilt, I strain to sense a larger trap, nod at Jesse, his pistol at full cock. A skittering of leaves behind us startles me like cannon shot; I whirl about to see a fat gray hare dart around the base of a thick pine and race off into the undergrowth.

  Some formless something quivers up on the other side of the tree trunk, knocking over the now empty trap in its haste. Too big for a boy, too small for a bear, it crouches there, swathed in some garment as gold and copper and green as the wood itself, something plaid above shapeless trousers. Fingertips stretch out to brace against the gnarled trunk; a white face peers out at us, under short-cropped hair. A human face.

  This is how I always find them, plucked from their world by some errant dream to fend for themselves until I take them in. I shrug at Jesse to lower his weapon, and—

  “Oi! That was our rabbit!” Nutter howls from behind me and gives chase, animating the others, who come crashing out of the underbrush from all sides, whooping and yelling.

  The stranger by the tree goggles, turns, and flees in the direction we’ve just come. I roar at the men to stop, but they are too excited by their game; too eager to release the tension. I can only hope to catch up to the fellow before the others frighten the wits out of him. He’s no use to me demented. I pump after him furiously, lungs heaving. If only he wouldn’t run. There’s nowhere to go.

  The fog-edged horizon of Neverland Bay stretches out beyond the bluff as we emerge out of the trees. If he escapes down the trail, ‘twill be a devil of a job tracking him all over the damned island. But at the edge of the bluff, his gait falters with indecision. With my men yelping at my heels, I lunge at the fellow, hook the flapping corner of his plaid coat. It jerks the stranger round in his tracks, coat yanked open, upper body twisting toward me. For a frozen instant, his wide eyes fasten upon my hook, as mine gape at a white shirt revealed under the coat, a white shirt stretched over a pair of unmistakably female breasts.

  God’s bollocks, a woman in the Neverland?

  “What in the bloody hell…!” she cries, and rips her plaid off my hook, stumbles backward, trips on the scrub, and plunges over the bluff with a shriek like a banshee.

  Chapter Five

  THE INFERNAL BOY

  Do I expect her to fly? Soar out over the bay on harpy wings? I could not be more astounded if she did. A woman! A fully formed female woman abroad in the Neverland. I’m a raving Bedlamite at last, or something very dire is afoot. Only Indian women who cook the food and heal the sick, who make it possible for the tribes to reproduce themselves, are allowed on this island, and they must keep to their villages, out of the boy’s sight. And ours. No other grown woman has ever been seen in the Neverland. Never, ever.

  But she does not reappear. Instead, a crunching of shrubs and a cascade of gravel and pebbles rattling down the trail echo back to us, along with her falling cry, abruptly cut off. We descend with
far less speed, but more care, down the bluff through a cloud of choking dust to find the creature sprawled on her stomach in the soft sand at its base, unstirring, head turned to one side. I am near enough to spy an arrangement of plain, metallic pins meant to contain her hair, although most has come loose in her tumble down the slope to spill across her cheek. But otherwise, she appears to be not much damaged; no pool of blood, nor twisted limbs.

  You’d scarcely know her for a female, garbed in her plaid jacket, a glimpse of white shirttail peeking out over loose dark trousers. Her feet are scarcely clad in soft, useless satiny things that expose her toes and heels. And she is surely not Indian; her face and hands are pale, her hair brownish and dusty, not long and silky black, much less done up in pearls and powder, as was the fashion in my day. But I am scarcely reassured.

  “Where did she come from?” grumbles Nutter, at my elbow.

  I stand back, frowning. “Who saw her first?”

  “You did, Cap’n.”

  “Did no one notice any commotion back in the wood?” I ask them all. “Any sign of boys?” The flying boys are not invisible; did they dump her in our path, someone must have seen them, but my men only shake their heads.

  “She can’t have fallen out of the sky,” I begin again, but of course, she might have done just that: this is the Neverland, where no witchery is impossible.

  The question is not how, but why?

  I gaze down again at the puzzling figure. This is no Wendy.

  They are not always called Wendy, the eager girls who are not yet women, his make-believe mothers. There have been many others: Imogen, Clara, Hortensia. Fatima. Genevieve. Wherever they come from, he speaks to them in their own tongue—the language of youth. But that element has flown from the visible part of her face. Care lines bracket her silent mouth in the harsh daylight. Her body has ripened well beyond girlhood, as I saw up on the bluff, a matron of no less than thirty, if I am any judge.

  Has the boy got himself a mother, a real mother, after all these years?

  I draw a sudden, anxious breath. “Not dead, is she?” I demand of the men.

  Nutter visibly draws back, Jesse totters uncertainly on his lame foot, and my gaze falls on young Flax. Peering about resentfully at the others, the fair-haired youth creeps forward, crouches low over the woman, stumbles awkwardly back.

  “Dead pissed, more like,” he says, wrinkling his nose, staggering again to his feet.

  Daring to bend nearer again, I too detect a whiff of stale alcohol. She’s begun to snore very softly now, through wet, parted lips. Small wonder she seems so little harmed. The devil protects drunkards and fools.

  “Beg pardon, Cap’n,” Burley’s soft, West Country voice tiptoes out to me from where the others have all regrouped, farther down the beach. “Best be out on the tide.”

  Their unease reinforces my own. Time was, a solitary female might have feared ravishment at the hands of my crew, but those were not these men. Females and their complications are part of what they come back to the Neverland to escape.

  But what now? I could leave her here to rot, that would be the sensible thing; this is Pan’s domain, let him deal with her. But the boy is not usually so careless with his mothers. Far more likely she is part of some diabolical new game, a spy the boy hopes to plant aboard my ship, possibly to divide my men from each other. True, she scarcely looks like a temptress, dressed like a hoyden in breeches in a threepenny farce, but what else can it possibly mean? A woman in the Neverland! Nothing happens here without Pan’s knowledge.

  Peter doesn’t know everything. Who said that? A voice out of a dream. I frown down again at the insensible creature. If she does not belong to Pan, how the devil has she broken through the sorcery that guards this place to come here? A way to break the enchantment; it’s worth any risk to understand if such a thing is possible.

  I order the men to make a sling from the loose tarp in the boat with which we covered Dodge. Nutter at one end, Burley at the other, they stretch it on the sand beside the slumbering woman, then back away, as if she might explode in their faces like a Spanish grenado. Let them fret. I will know why she is here. If she proves to be a pawn in some dreadful new game, I must find out what it is before Pan can claim another victory in blood.

  * * *

  The men are not happy to have her in the boat, concealed in the tarp in the bottom. They shrink to the ends of their thwarts as they pull out into the bay for the current to carry us back to the Rouge. I raise my spyglass and scan again for war canoes from the north, where the high plains of Indian Territory abut the boy’s wood.

  The Indians are not like me. They have long since made peace with the boy. The Pickaninnys, he calls them, a foolish name that sounds suitably aboriginal to his untested ear. What they call themselves in the oblique syllables of their own ancient tongue, I cannot say. Their battles with the boy are play; when he does not want them, they are free to tend their families, their corn, their buffalo, and their ceremonies. To live, age, and die. The Neverland is their refuge, not their prison, especially now that so many of the Wendys’ stories tell of the destruction and enslavement of the Indian races. To preserve it, they go on the bloody warpath at the boy’s pleasure against their common enemy: me.

  But no dark canoes pepper the bay today. I twist round to sweep my glass northward one last time, before my view goes black, like a curtain rung down on a play.

  “Hook!” bleats a shrill voice I know only too well. “What do you think you’re doing out here?”

  He’s come upon us with the stealth of a fairy, flown up from behind my oarsmen while I was too distracted to sense the chill of his presence. Pan, our nemesis, the demon king of the Neverland, author of all our misery.

  How little he’s changed over time: a rag-mop of tawny hair, bright, feral gray eyes, still hovering on the youthful side of eleven or so. Vines of ivy cinch his middle over the napless pelt of some no longer recognizable animal. More vines twine from hip to shoulder for a bandolier where he stows his badges of office—his pipes, an ancient bear claw, a once proud raptor feather tattered with age and filth. His short sword is thrust through his belt, the knob of a knife handle protrudes from the top of one fur-skin boot as he circles in the air above the men, facing me. He appears to be entirely alone.

  “Well, Hook,” he cries again, “what game is this?”

  Tension thrums among the men, staring up at this impossible vision, a boy riding the air currents overhead with the ease of an albatross. None have ever seen him so close-up before. Beneath the Pan, behind his sight line, I see Jesse’s fingers inch off his oar, stretch toward his pistol. Something thrills in my blood, but prudence snuffs it out: no, not here, a misfire now will cost all their lives. I hastily signal him to halt in the act of raising my hand to tilt back my hat.

  “No game,” I tell Pan. “We are burying one of our shipmates,”

  “I don’t believe it.” He frowns down at the suspicious canvas at our feet, buzzes closer to me. He takes special delight in punishing deceit. “We haven’t even had a fight!”

  “It was none of your doing,” I begin, and instantly regret it as his keen expression clouds over. It’s utter folly to suggest anything could happen in the Neverland beyond his command.

  “I think you’re trying to escape again!” he counters.

  “Come, my bully, you know me better than that,” I cozen him patiently. “Do you think me a fool?”

  “I think you’re a liar and a cheat,” he sneers at me, with that maddening half-smile that is so often a prelude to death. “I think you’re a man!”

  Should he take it into his head to draw his sword, my men will be at a fearful disadvantage; there’s buggering little room to maneuver in a boat, and we are vulnerable on the water. None of them can swim, I venture; for myself, I dread eternal life underwater above all things, forever at the mercy of monsters like the loreleis and the crocodile, eyes bulging, skin spongy, lungs forever bursting for want of air. I shake off the thought.
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  “You’re up to something, Hook,” Pan accuses, peering at me with combative intensity. “I can feel it!”

  “We are a funeral party, nothing more,” I say calmly, banishing all thoughts of the cargo we carry. I’ve learned to think nothing, care for nothing, in his presence. But if he planted that woman in our path, why come all the way out here, alone, instead of bringing a formal war party of boys to the ship? That’s the way it’s always been.

  Unless he doesn’t know.

  “But since you’ve come all this way, let’s have a game,” I add quickly, my fingers sliding into my coat pocket in search of one of the many objects I keep about my person to barter with the little magpie. I must turn this moment to my advantage before he can set his own rules. My fingers close around something smooth and hard, which I withdraw. Too late, I recognize the stiletto recently liberated from Dodge. It’s folly to arm the boy with another weapon to use against us, but there’s no time to find anything else. I stand carefully in the stern, leg braced against Burley’s solid bulk, and Pan rises too, giving the men some breathing room.

  “This blade says you can’t give me true answers to three questions,” I challenge Pan, holding the closed knife aloft. He’s arrested in midair, watches with birdlike curiosity as I press the metal button to snap out the blade. Slowly, he bares his baby teeth and nods. “How many men in this boat?” I begin, hooking the knife closed again.