Alias Hook (11 page)

To do what? I can scarcely grasp the notion before she stretches out one brown hand to me. And for all my rage, for all the suffering she has caused me, the dead stump in my chest shudders for an instant and I see my own hand reach for hers. Yet I feel no warmth, no weight, no solid flesh; my fingers clutch at nothing but air, and I stumble in the sand as her teeth shine in a cruel smile.

“It is too late to choose
me,
” and she waves me away like a meddlesome fly. “I am dead.”

Of course she’s dead; they are all dead these two hundred years and more. Dead, the only choice that can never be mine. This is how she loves me. “How long will you torment me?” I demand.

“Wrong question,
Capitaine,”
she sighs. “Perhaps you are still not ready. I may regret I gave you this chance.”

“What chance?” I cry. But Proserpina is evaporating into the shadows, leaving nothing behind but a last, insinuating purr. “Play well.”

Jezebel, to torture me with phantom hopes and riddles. I will never play again, and she knows it. And as I whirl round and round in the shadows, desperate for escape, the trees and the sand and the night all vanish with Proserpina and I am once again in the midst of blazing light with a solid surface under my feet. I cringe, narrowing my eyes against the sudden brilliance, until the lights mute themselves to a softer glow. Somehow, I’ve strayed into a vast hall. Elegant alabaster columns support an arched ceiling too distant to be seen, mountains of fragrant flowers—lilies, jasmine, narcissus— on huge piles of greenery erupt out of urns and pots and tubs and baskets in every direction, and the surrounding walls shine like glass, mirroring the light. I turn round and round in my dazzlement and terror. The Great Hall of the Fairy Queen.

She enters by nothing so prosaic as a door. Rather, a shifting in the quality of light, as indistinct as the edge of a rainbow, and a rustling among the flowers announces her presence. In any direction I look, there she is, advancing upon me, the dark intruder in her proud domain of light.

She’s draped in some gauzy stuff, ephemeral as morning mist, all flowing, glittering train with no substance. Her body is entirely visible within, skin so smooth and rounded she gleams in the light, nipples sparkling on creamy breasts, like fine confections tipped in silver dust. Arcane symbols painted in royal purple decorate one exposed shoulder and trail down to swirl suggestively round one breast. Her pale hair is not blonde but bright, waves of it shimmering all around her in a spectrum of colors too brilliant to register on mortal eyes. Her own vivid eyes are shifting echoes of the moonlight, circled in violet and shadowed in green. She’s like an effigy of spun sugar and ice, fragile as breath, but for the primordial power of her presence.

She needs no throne, no pedestal, to loom before me, nor does she disturb the silken, translucent wings that arch so high above her head and trail their filigree appendages upon the floor. She merely glimmers there, an imposing figure of more than my own height, less than an armspan away, radiating unnatural heat, and a dangerous earthiness born of an underworld mortal men are wise to fear. And yet, every part of my traitor’s body, my palm, my sex, my withered ghost of a heart throbs in unison just to behold her, do I will it or not.

“Welcome to our revels, Captain.” She addresses me not so much in language as in sensation I am powerless to resist, not discordant like the common fairies, but slow, beguiling; her meaning flows inside my head, a shivering of distant chimes on a warm breeze. “To what do we owe this … pleasure?”

Too late I remember who I am and what business has brought me here. “My Lady—” I stammer.

“I am Queen BellaAeola, sovereign of this place.”

“Majesty,” I amend, remembering at last to make a leg and bow. “I mean no harm,” I lie. I can’t confess I’ve come to her forest to ferret out the boys. “I seek … a friend.”

The fairy monarch flutters closer, her expression lively. “You have found one.”

My flesh crawls even as my blood boils from her nearness. Her purple tattoos dance about on her skin like living things; lacy patterns twist and unfurl round the fullness of her breast, tongues of liquid flame stretch lewdly toward her swollen silver nipple.

“Ask of me what you will, “she murmurs with drowsy intimacy. “This is not a night for refusals.”

I open my mouth, but no sound emerges. My wit has flown with the queen’s arrival, leaving only hungry flesh and gnawing desire, defenseless and exposed. How can she not know me for what I am? She is the queen of all witchery.

Her fluting merriment sounds again, echoing all round the iridescent walls. I sense her pressing closer, although she does not appear to move, her rich, musky scent, her simmering laughter, the sheer voluptuous power of her person cocooning me, shutting out all else. “I know what you seek, Captain,” she chimes.

I am not fit to reply.

“Release,” she hisses softly.

“Yes,” I whisper.

“Comfort,” she murmurs, her inflection slow and musical. “Rest. Peace.”

“Please,” I groan, closing my eyes. Respite, release, indeed, such pleasure as I have not known in centuries, all could be mine, if only I would surrender. She can do it, I know it, I can feel it. My bully self, my pride, my wit, my rage, all are dissolving, along with my will. I have no will. I have no self. Her glamor oozes over me like aspic, trapping me in helpless thrall. Yes. Please.

The round, precise notes of her voice are a rippling
arpeggio
of unparalleled beauty. “What will you give me, Captain?”

“My life,” I rasp.

“You do not value your life,” the enchantress replies carelessly.

My eyes startle open, a tremor of fear shivers through me. She watches me avidly, tilting her head from side to side like a curious sparrow.

“My … my soul,” I babble, and receive only another volley of brittle laughter worthy of Proserpina for my reply. “Majesty,” I plead, like the most creeping, cringing, vilest sot, “whatever I have, it’s yours—”

What might I not promise away next, in my humiliation? But the fairy queen is already disengaging me from her spell, the trembling promise of peace, respite, comfort, hope ebbing away, leaving me shipwrecked and stranded on cold, unfriendly shoals.

“Talk, talk, talk,” she flutes in her sing-songy manner. “Foolish man. You have changed nothing.”

With a single massive swoop of her wings, she rises up into the limitlesss vault of the hall above me.

“Majesty, wait!” I’m all but sobbing, falling to my knees on the hard stone floor.

“You value nothing, Captain. You are of no use to me.”

“But—”

“Twice before, the Red Moon has risen, and you have done nothing,” her waterfall voice pipes down to me. “This is your last chance. You will not get another. Seize it soon, or your cause is lost.” And she sweeps herself up out of the light, and all is suddenly darkness and stillness and despair in her wake. The hall, the mirrors, the bountiful flowers, all vanish, and I’m on my knees in the forest, the wet of trampled grass seeping into my stockings. The laughing moon is slinking to westward, the forest is black and still and unpopulated to my eyes so recently bedazzled by the light. A mournful breeze stirs in the trees, bringing with it the acrid scent of crushed nectar and the occasional fleeting sigh or snuffle of an unseen sleeper in the dark, but the revels of Faery are concluded, or else I can no longer see them.

I’d have wagered anything that my deliverance was at hand at last, but nothing is won here without the forfeit of something else. Not until I shiver with more than the night chill at how close I’ve come to losing my grip on all that I am do I begin to recover my senses.

By what unbalanced delusion could I even imagine the imp queen would help me? This is the Neverland. No one will help me here. I’m no more than a game to Queen BellaAeola, as I am to her ally, the boy. Fairy seduction is only another victory to win over me, and I exposed my back to the cat like the most witless gull, begging and sniveling for the favor of her rejection. As if my encounters with Caroline and Proserpina were not cruel enough; by God’s black heart, how could they still wound me so completely after all this time? The fairy queen spoke too of a red moon, a Blood Moon, twice risen. Once when I did for old Bill Jukes, centuries ago. When was the other time? Only in my dreams. And this chance they all taunt me with, surely no more than another means to unbalance and humiliate me. What cause is not lost here? We are all lost. We are all damned.

I’ve not risen from the grass, as immobilized by despair as I was in BellaAeola’s erotic web. In the damp silence, I begin to notice a low, quiet, miserable sound. It’s not the distant sirens this time, nor the moaning of fairies, but something more wretched. A human voice.

Shifting to my feet, I follow it in the dark, picking my way across tangled roots and pine needles to an ancient tree stump, half as high as a man, covered over with moss and bramble. Something shelters there, on the ground between two roots. By the last of the moonlight, I recognize the Parrish woman on her knees in the lee of the stump, her pale face bent over something cradled in her arms. She reacts not at all to my approach, only kneels there, keening mournfully. Too weary to maintain the game of cat-and-mouse, I steady my hook in the old bark and lower myself to crouch beside her, peering at what she holds. What I take at first for a moldering bouquet proves to be an armload of dead, dry grasses, reeds and rushes. A dark shape lies within them, and I peep closer over her shoulder to see what it is. A brown sparrow, stiff and cold, stares up at me out of its dead, glassy eye.

Parrish turns her white face up to me, her dark eyes glazed with sorrow. “My baby,” she rasps. “I’ve lost my baby.”

I should flee for my sanity, had I an ounce of strength left, but I can only cling to the stump as she gazes up at me from the depths of her unvarnished wretchedness.

“Madam.” My shaking voice betrays me, and I stop.

“I tried to hold on to him,” she murmurs. “I held him in my arms, they let me hold him.” She lifts up her ghastly burden a little, and I struggle not to recoil. “He lived. He looked at me. He knew me, I’m sure.”

She turns back to the bundle in her arms. “We knew each other, didn’t we?” she croons softly. “You and I. My baby. You were so much stronger than me, so much wiser, such an ancient soul, oh, God—” Her voice catches; she clutches the dead bird closer, and my blood chills. She begins to rock her upper body, back and forth, back and forth, cradling the thing to her breast.

“I was the failure,” she whispers to it. She looks back up at me, a white face so beyond tragedy it seems inanimate. “I couldn’t keep him alive. I lost them both. I failed them both.”

“Madam,” I try again, shaken to gentleness by our fearful encounters, desperate to break through this last grim enchantment. “This is not your child.”

She blinks at me. “I know,” she agrees sadly. “My baby’s dead. I killed him.”

3

Chilled by more than the pre-dawn cold, it takes me a few moments to command my wits to action. At last, I inch my hand toward her bundle, and her gaze slides down to watch.

“Let me.” I can scarcely breathe the words.

Parrish nods slowly, and when my hand is near enough, she sighs and shifts her little burden to me.

“Don’t hurt him,” she whispers.

I lower the creature in its bed of brown grass as carefully as I might into the shelter of the next root, steady the makeshift nest with my hook to see the little corpse does not tip out. She watches in stoic silence.

“Thank you, Captain,” she murmurs at last.

“You know me?” I almost groan with relief; she’s not yet a madwoman, and I am still a creature of flesh and blood and sanity.

Her gaze turns to me, and I see some faint trace of life and purpose returning to her eyes. They have a greenish tint here in the wood, or perhaps it’s the moonlight. She regards me in silence for another moment.

“You are Captain Hook,” she says, at last, “and I am a long way from London.”

“Welcome to the Neverland,” I say dryly.

She shivers a little inside her jacket, darts a wistful glance at the dead bird in its nest. “I thought it might have been him,” she adds softly. “I thought maybe he was the one who called me here.”

“This is scarcely Paradise. The dead do not come here to seek their reward.”

“I saw him just now,” she says to her empty lap.

As I saw Caroline and Proserpina, nearly forfeiting my wits for the fairies’ idle amusement. A part of me longs to fly like wingéd Hermes back to the protection of my ship, my cabin, and my pots of rum, to obliterate the memory of all I’ve seen in the Dell. Yet I crave the presence of another mortal in this desolate place, for if Parrish were truly one of their witchy tribe, why would the fairies discard her so cruelly?

“You saw phantoms only,” I tell her. “The imps will find out your weakness and use it against you. They will turn your dreams to ash, destroy even the memory of whatever might have once been good in your life—”

I have her full attention now. I stop talking, embarrassed by her scrutiny.

“Come away, Parrish,” I begin again. “We mustn’t stay here. This is an evil place.”

I grasp the tree stump to steady myself, offer my hook arm to help her up, and she takes it. Her grasp is strong, substantial, alive, and I am grateful for it. We are not out of this wood yet.

Some primordial thing as out of time as myself flaps by overhead on leathery wings with a raucous shriek that startles us both out of our separate reveries. The forest answers with a volley of restless snarling and trumpeting; shrubs rustle, twigs crack, a covey of starlings spooked up out of one roost, circle in a fractious black cloud, and alight in another. Night in the wood belongs to the imps, but dawn belongs to the beasts.

It’s not yet daybreak as I herd Parrish along an old hunter’s trail, but a rising tide of birdsong greets the promise of dawn. If we lose our turning, I listen for the boom of surf and sniff the air for salt to keep us heading for the bluff above the bay. But she can’t be hurried, shuffling along in her useless slippers, now sodden and filthy, lost in her own thoughts.