Alias Hook Read online

  “Not enough to beat me!” the boy gloats.

  True enough. Pan can’t count past three, but neither does he lie. “Where are your boys?”

  “I sent them to the Indians to learn how to scalp.”

  No shrieking has been heard on the water that would signal my men are their victims, back aboard the Rouge. Surely Pan would not be here, missing all the fun, if they were. In any case, his wild pack of boys will not attack without their leader. But I must gather my wits; an extra question out of turn will forfeit the game. I revolve the prize in my fingers. I’ll not let it go without something of value in return, if I can play one audacious trump without tipping my own hand.

  “For what reason would you ever bring a grown-up woman into the Neverland?”

  “That’s a stupid question!” snorts Pan.

  “And that is no answer,” I shrug, and begin to lower the weapon.

  “I never would! Never, ever!” he shouts indignantly. “No grown-ups allowed in the Neverland, especially no lady! I would never let one come here, and nobody else better, either,” he adds with a furious glare. “That’s the truth!” And he swoops down to snatch the weapon out of my grasp. “I win again, Hoo—”

  But Nutter springs up, all yowling impulse and no strategy at all, his giant fingers closing round one of Pan’s mangy boots, and for an instant Pan flails sideways in the air.

  “No fair!” the boy shouts. Like all tyrants, he believes he himself always acts with the utmost fairness. Then up he goes in a detonation of fiery sparks, a reek of brimstone, and a shrill cacophony of fairy language, leaving Nutter grasping empty air, and the boat near scuttled beneath us.

  “Hey!” Pan cries in irritation from high above us. “Kes!”

  Of course his imp is nearby. I throw mysef over Nutter to shield him from the inevitable retaliation, glancing up just as a dazzling flash scorches my eyes. Amid the frenzy of shouting men and harsh fairy noise, hands I cannot see pry me off Nutter and grapple me back to my seat in the reeling boat.

  “Nothing happens in the Neverland unless I say so!” Pan’s voice shouts from his magical updraft. “Don’t you forget it, Hook!”

  Then nothing but grumbling men and water lapping against our boat. Whatever the fairy threw in my eyes burns there still, although I presume it will not last; fairy spells, like all their humors, are fleeting. But she’d already bustled the boy out of harm’s way, was it necessary to half-blind me into the bargain? The wooden thwart rocks beneath me as the men fight to steady the boat, grunt at their creaking oars. Their acrid man-sweat mingles with the pungency of brine and salt and fish off the water. But the menace I felt in my bones when the boy was about has subsided.

  “Gone, Cap’n.” It’s Flax’s voice, directly across from me, clotted with incredulity. It’s always a shock, the first time they actually see an aviating boy.

  “Sorry, Cap’n, I couldn’t get a clear shot,” Jesse apologizes.

  “Almost had the little wanker,” grumbles Nutter.

  At least they still have breath to voice their defiance. No more lives were lost today, and all I had to forfeit was my sight. I might almost count it a victory. To say nothing of the information I gleaned from the boy. No grown-up women allowed? He could not have been more vehement on that point.

  If Pan didn’t bring her here, who did?

  Chapter Six

  PERISH

  “It’ll have to be up front, Cap’n,” mutters Sticks, my carpenter.

  “The foredeck?” I echo, peering at him in the gloom belowdecks. “It’s no use to me there. Why not build it where I mean to use it, on the quarterdeck?”

  I am deep in the hold in my shirtsleeves as Sticks and I inspect the store of timber we keep on board for building shields. The imp’s spiteful charm has worn off over the course of the day, but my vision is still tender in dark places, and for close work, I must resort to a pair of gold-rimmed spectacles I keep about me these days, left behind by a former crewman who needs them no more. Squinting through them now, I frown at what I see. Our shields are primitive wooden devices that offer my men some protection against airborne blades and arrows in hand-to-hand combat, but these staves are short, to be nailed onto a frame and carried. I’ve something more substantial in mind for this new barricade, a shelter from which to deploy a long-range weapon, wielded by a skilled marksman.

  Sticks scratches at the top of his pink pate, where the hairline has begun its retreat, twirls at the stubby yellow pencil behind his ear. “No room t’set up my table and tools,” he shrugs at me.

  The fellow was certainly in some sort of building trade back in the world. He’s learned he has nothing to fear from me so long as he speaks sense; I am not unfamiliar with the carpentry trade myself, and he knows it. And in this case, I know he is right. I had my quarterdeck severely chopped for faster sailing, back when the Rouge could still call herself a sailing vessel; there’s scarcely room there now for more than my daily pacing. Then too, action on board the Rouge always occurs forward, where Long Tom is stationed, or in the waist. It may indeed be best to erect this new battlement in the bows, should any imps or flying boys come snooping about, to conceal our purpose of launching an attack from the rear.

  “We can build ’em in sections,” Sticks offers.

  “Hinged together,” I agree, absently pushing the spectacles up my nose. “Lightweight, for easy transport later. Excellent. Make your preparations.”

  He stops playing with his pencil, ducks his head slightly. “Aye, Cap’n,” he murmurs, and turns away to tot up what he’ll need.

  Wan daylight seeping in from the hatch provides the only illumination as I slide off my spectacles and fold them into my hand. Heading for the hatchway, I step gingerly through rank bilgewater, round the shadowy shapes of casks, crates, and forgotten ancient plunder that’s served as ballast for centuries. I near leap out of my skin when one of the shadows presumes to speak.

  “Cap’n? Fink I could ’ave a word?”

  “Yes, Filcher?” I command myself to resume breathing. He’s scarce more than a wraithlike silhouette in the gloom.

  “Well, you always want to know wot’s going on below decks, like,” my first mate reminds me.

  I nod. That is the chief commission of his office, one to which his life of petty crime has made him particularly well suited.

  He fidgets with a wisp of his limp, straw-colored hair. “Well, it’s the lads. They fink we ’adn’t oughter ’ave ’er aboard, Cap’n.”

  “Ah.” The men have been restive on this point all day, ever since I had the woman stowed in one of the smaller cabins adjacent to mine, where a great litter of empty bottles, spare cordage, fouled, moldy canvas, and the Devil only knows what other disgusting flotsam have been abandoned for centuries. At present, she is still too stuporous to tell me anything, but I can wait. We’ve nothing but time in the Neverland.

  “Fink it’s bad luck, like,” Filcher goes on, uneasily. “A Jonah.”

  So it always is in the stories, whenever a Wendy is brought on board as a hostage, else how would these lubbers even know the word? “On what grounds?” I prompt him carefully.

  “No women allowed,” he reminds me. “We all ’eard the little brat. She opened all our traps. And what about Dodge?”

  “Dodge?” I frown at him. “Are they saying—”

  “Nobody’s saying nuffink, Cap’n,” Filcher rejoins quickly. “But Dodge were pretty sharp up in the, um, you know…”

  “Yards,” I remind him patiently.

  “Yeah, and the ropes ’n’ all.”

  “And he were pretty drunk,” I point out.

  “I’n’it odd, though, that she shows up the very day we lose Dodge?” Filcher persists, with an emphatic nod.

  I fail to see this connection, exactly, but I know how idle minds crave a scapegoat for all their ills.

  “And them bleedin’ drums last night.”

  This is a point worth taking. Should there be some new game in play, the Indians might wel
l be involved. Was their infernal drumming a warning meant to cow us, or a rehearsal for victory meant to mock us? But there is no one among my crew to whom I might unburden myself of these thoughts. They must be led or they will be twice as vulnerable.

  “Mr. Filcher,” and I drop my voice to a low, conspiratorial tone, “do not imagine for one moment that Hook does not have a reason for everything he does. This woman may harbor information we can use against the boys, something that could save our lives. You would oblige me by telling the men that for all our sakes, she’s not to be harassed or provoked until I get it out of her.”

  “Aye, aye, Cap’n,” Filcher agrees, perkier now to think he’s privy to an important confidence, and he melts back into the shadows.

  If this woman is a chit in some hideous new game, I will know it soon enough. But if she is here in spite of Pan’s wishes, that too is worth knowing. If the boy’s power over all in this place is not absolute, if there is a chink in his glamorous armor, I must be prepared to bend events to my advantage. To seize my chance.

  * * *

  The tinkling of a tiny bell.

  Don’t be afraid.

  An unseen companion almost near enough to touch.

  There is always a way out. Take my hand.

  And there in the darkness, a fleeting smile in a face I still can’t see, yet warmth floods into my blood, and I am on board a ship sailing straight into the sky, under a bloodred moon, over a dark sea that sparkles like stars, and I am rising with it, surging toward something wonderful. Yes. Please. Sail me all the way this time …

  Then the dull thud of my hook against the bedpost rattles me awake, as if I were attempting to flap into the air like some deluded albatross, and I sink back into the bedclothes, disoriented, aching. Betrayed, yet again, by my infuriating dream. More real than ever tonight, and thrice as terrible, beguiling me with a ghostly smile. A lamp burns on the bedside table, next to another bottle my steward must have brought in while I slept. My stomach churns at the very thought. Wine is no proof against dreaming.

  Children find the Neverland in their dreams; their longing bores through the barrier between their world and this one, and in they tumble. My men, too, return in this way. For ages I deluded myself it must be possible to dream a way out. But my dreams were coy and would not come at all, or else plagued me with dark and muddled shades of my old world, bitter memories to which I have no desire to return—my heedless youth, the cruel circumstances by which I turned to piracy, the sorcery that brought me here. Or else I dreamed visions of appalling violence, cities in ruins, fire raining down from the sky. These are my dreams: savage nightmare or mocking torment, a phantom ship that never quite bears me away.

  I stagger up from my bed, and a length of silk rustles over the side in my wake, a waterfall of peacock, gold, and burgundy that glistens in the firelight, puddling at my feet. It’s still dark night out my stern windows. I turn to my ancient sea chest at the foot of my bed, the deck cold against my bare feet, my linen shirt sweat-drenched and reeking, throw back the lid of my chest, and fall to my knees before it. My shoulder aches inside my harness as I hook aside more shirts and cravats, braided breeches of ancient vintage, my fingers probing the mustiest hidden crevices of the chest for any packet I might once have squirreled away and forgotten.

  But my medicines are long gone.

  They always bring him medicine, the Wendys, hoping to control him in the way parents have hoped to control their children for centuries. In my day, a pot of gin did for the little whelps, but medicines have grown more subtle since then, more dark and alluring. I have tried them all. They never can control the Pan, of course, and even though the Wendys leave their medicines behind when they leave him, he soon forgets the promises he made them. I suppose one day he comes upon the bottle or packet or cunning little jar gathering dust on his shelf and can’t recall what it’s for; more often than not, he pitches it over the cliff onto my beach. That is where I find them.

  The black drops are the best, lazy in the mind and sweet with forgetfulness. Aches and pains wash away, along with cares, worries, anger, despair. Nothing hurts any more. Nothing matters. My sleep is sound and dreamless. Time is beguiled; for a few hours, I can be content. It was a very great pity to me when the drops fell out of fashion. Later medicines have been foul in the nose, vile on the tongue, and unsettling to the bowels, causing more anxiety than they relieve. Yet I’d gladly swallow a hogshead of any of them this minute, could I find any.

  I slam shut the lid of my chest and sway up by the bedpost as an idea glimmers, wraith-like, in my brain. The woman. The mother. Perhaps she’s brought medicine for the boys. I hook up the lantern by its ring and stagger out into the passage.

  It’s still as a tomb inside the dark little cabin, and it stinks of the mold of centuries. Lamp hanging from my hook, I halt in the doorway until its jittery light washes over her plaid garment, tossed over the foot of the makeshift bunk. Ignoring the lump in the bedclothes where she lies, I stalk the few steps across that narrow space, flatten my hand over her coat. Some woolen stuff it is, nappy under my fingers as I pat it for hidden recesses. From one square pocket, I withdraw a small circlet of some dark, tarnished metal that might have once been silver, tiny ornaments of a nautical character—a seahorse, a dolphin, a miniscule sailboat, a tiny bell that has lost its clapper, as I notice when I shake it, but none large enough to conceal even a grain of powder, and so I thrust it back in its pocket. I flip the thing over, feel along the satiny lining, but discover no other bulges, no ridges, not so much as a single friendly drop.

  “What are you doing?”

  Her voice cleaves the shadows and I jerk up my hook to widen the dim pool of light to where she is, propped up on one elbow in the farthest corner of the bunk, wide eyes on me.

  “That is no concern of yours,” I rumble, releasing her useless coat with an angry flourish.

  “I don’t have any money,” she persists, sitting up by inches, her back pressing into the corner.

  “Your money is no use to me,” I spit back. How dare she take me for someone like Filcher, a common thief? Yet how must I look to her, shirt askew, hair unbound, my hook in the shadows above the circle of light.

  “Who are you?” she asks.

  “Who are you, Woman?” I parry. “That is the question.”

  Her eyes are dark and steady in the dim room, where all else seems to pitch with the swaying light. “I’m called Perish.”

  The light trembles under my hook, cold shock jolting through my bones. Perish. Has my savior come at last, formed like a woman? Who else can it be? He whose name is Legion: bone-crusher, blood-drinker, life-taker. Reaper. Ravager. Ruin. Perish. Almighty Death, the only god to whom I’ve prayed in two hundred years.

  Is that why I had the dream again tonight? This must be the chance I am meant to seize, could I but find voice to respond.

  “Have you come for me?”

  Chapter Seven

  MAKE-BELIEVE

  Have I cursed Death in my drunken belligerence?

  “No, I don’t think so,” she said, and I heard myself refused again, mocked again, cheated out of my reward yet again. I had no more sense than to reel out of her cabin, damning her for her mockery.

  But now, in the bleak, cold light of daybreak, I realize it must have been a test, some formal exchange I was too witless to perceive in my rage. What else can it mean, a woman in the Neverland, but a chance extended to me at last? Now I can only pray it is not too late, that I can yet fulfill whatever is required by this Angel of Death. Perhaps she didn’t even know me last night, mistook me for some other ruffian in my crew.

  I rouse Brassy, my steward, as the first gray tentacles of dawn slither up over the island. I call for a pot of his vile brew, and a bucket of cold water in which to dunk my head and brace up my wits.

  “Has my guest been seen to?” I demand, wringing out my hair.

  Brassy pauses at the row of my hats hanging on their pegs beneath the stern window, caught
in the act of selecting my pink-feathered tricorne to lay out beside my canary breeches. Did I leave it to my steward, I’d be dressed like a clown at Bartholomew Fair. He eyes me with more than his customary uncertainty.

  “Food? Drink?” I elaborate. Death may not consume mortal food, but for form’s sake, I must offer hospitality.

  “No, Captain. No one told us to feed her.”

  This is a canto from Spenser, coming from my monosyllabic steward. “Have Cookie stew a decent piece of fish and take it in with a bottle of my best madeira and my compliments,” I instruct him, sending him off.

  Turning to my wardrobe, I select dark breeches, white hose, a lawn shirt with a waterfall of French lace at the throat. My ceremonial scarlet coat, braided in gold, my grandest bucket-cuff boots, and a black velvet ribbon to tie back my hair. Elegant hats have always been my most shameless indulgence, and I choose my most impressive, indigo, upswept on one side, its wide brim boiling over with fat ribbons of scarlet and gold. I mean to impress. This time, my savior will know me.

  * * *

  She’s perched on the bunk, one leg tucked up immodestly beneath her, the other outthrust, a bare toe peeping out from the ridiculous slipper beneath her trouser leg, her shirttails hanging out. She scoots forward as I sweep open the door, but freezes there when I display myself in all my finery, hat cocked at a rakish angle, my fine French cutlass at my side, hand fisted at my hip, hook tilted slightly upward. Her eyes dilate like a cat’s in the dark; they seem to fill her entire face.

  “Bloody hell,” she exclaims.

  Eons of practice have taught me to keep a grip on my composure. “Welcome to my ship.”

  Her dark, wary eyes move to my upraised appendage. Slowly, slowly, she inclines her head.

  “Captain Hook.”

  “At your command,” I reply with elaborate politesse, as I decide how best to play her. If I am recognized as the scoundrel who affronted her last night, she does not show it. At the last moment I remember to sweep off my hat and make a leg like a courtier in a Italian comedy. My manners are as rusty as the corroding hull over which I stand, but I’ve never needed them more. Her eyes remain fixed on me. Only a few token pins still cling to her dark hair; the rest is loose, wavy, bouncing just above her shoulders. “To what do I owe this great honor?” I prompt her delicately.