Alias Hook (24 page)

“Stella.”

It escapes in a forlorn bubble and drifts into the grotto.

Out of the riotous colors something comes wriggling toward me under a cloud of dark, greenish hair: pale arms outstretched, round breasts bared, serpentine tail reflecting all the rainbow colors snaking back and forth as she hurtles up to me, the lorelei I saw above, or her sister. Her eyes are turquoise, like the water of the Indies. I’m too exhausted to struggle, my hook too heavy to raise in the water. She takes my face in both her long-fingered hands; I feel rubbery webbing and the grit of sand against my cheek, open my mouth in a useless cry, and air explodes out of me, the last I’ll ever taste, as she thrusts her face to mine and opens her wide, gleaming mouth to suck the life out of me. My last thought is for Stella.

But when her wet lips press to mine, she breathes air, warm, dry, blesséd air into my mouth. I inhale it hungrily into withering lungs, and she gives me more. I’m almost clear-headed again when she peels away and dives down under the arch into the grotto with a snap of her tail. I clamber after her in a fever of need, my hand fisted round the air bladder thrust awkwardly forward, my hook dragging behind. Then my hand runs into thin, slippery mesh I can neither claw past nor through; I try to back away, and more of the stuff drops over me wrapping round me like a spider’s web, cocooning me like a moth.

I am netted.

2

It’s no use wriggling or squirming as I’m dragged into the grotto. Through a haze of colors, my captors’ fishtails flicker on either side of me; the water thrums with their language, or their laughter. I taste wet lips, salty tongue, as one, then the other press air into my mouth, yet I am scarcely conscious as I’m drawn into a dark passage, unceremoniously scraped against a jagged wall, feel a vibrato in the water like a remonstrance, and a softer ripple of apology. Through the passage at last, an aurora of lights pulses far overhead, I’m flying into a starry sky, toward the arch of a rainbow. Then my head breaks the water’s surface.

Air! So much, I gag on it. Wet mesh clings to my face, but I throw back my head and slurp in air, choking and spluttering, my lungs heaving as I’m dragged to the edge of a pool, hauled onshore, where I lay coughing and panting, sucking in the abundance of air. The shock of it is like the finest spirits; my brain reels, intoxicated, exhausted, slipping in and out of sense.

Hard rock beneath me, neither sand nor mud, this is my first sensible thought. How long have I lain here? Long enough for my joints to ache, my muscles to cramp. I’m still bound in mesh, my clothing briny-stiff. It’s not a dream. I open my eyes to find myself discarded like an old boot on a ledge of hard shale that rings the pool I came up in. The sirens who dragged me here maneuver themselves across it, sitting up on their tails like sea lions, rotating their after-fins like rudders.

We’re in another grotto, hidden behind the first, but this one full of air above the pool, under a ceiling of rock as high as a cathedral. Clusters of glowing, incandescent crystals, unimaginable in the world above, thrust downward from the rock ceiling like gaudy chandeliers, bathing everything in rainbow hues: turquoise green, cobalt blue, ruby, violet. Soft, dark shadows gird the perimeter of this enclosed space so far from the sun, but a luminous mineral haze hangs in the air, and the water glows velvet green. And in every direction I peer, twisting my head around, are mermaids, a score at least, some idling along the surface of the water, others hauled up onshore, murmuring together in pairs or lounging on thick mats of seaweed and grass and kelp plumped into crevices of the rock.

Their variety amazes me. In the water they glimmer blue and green and purple, but others on shore are chocolate brown or pink or caramel above their fishtails, like human females on land. One elderly, dusky-colored dame, hair knotted into a sunburst of snow-white tufts all round her head, strands of shells and sea glass clattering on her bony breast, sits up on her coiled tail higher up the bank, amid thin spires of crenellated rock. Others have distended bellies above their scales, or cradle infants who flap their shiny little tails. Most wear shells round necks or waists, or in their hair. None are modest.

As I attempt to shift my sore body, they quiet their chatter and peer at me. Twisting up my head, I see an opening like the mouth of a small cave not far from me, set back along the rocky shore. Something stirs in the shadows within, a whisper of white fabric.

“Parrish!” I croak.

The white thing moves, grows larger as she comes crawling to the mouth of the cave like a child, on her hands and knees, her wrists no longer bound. She’s breathing, alert, alive. Her dark eyes widen with surprise.

“Captain!” she exclaims. “But … what … what in the name of God’s spleen are you doing here?”

“Looking for you, looking for you, looking for you!” chants one of my captors, materializing from behind me, the dark-haired jezebel who filled my mouth with air, then lured me into this trap. Her inky-green seaweed hair is plaited back in dozens and dozens of long, snaky coils trailing down her back. She wriggles up to Stella, balancing something liquid and luminous on upturned fingertips, which she bats delicately upward: it’s a bubble. It breaks in midair with a tiny pop, and a sound like a far-off echo bursts out of it.

“Stella.”

It’s my own voice, or a ghost of it, forlorn with defeat. Stella climbs to her feet, peering down at me without a word to say. My captor is looking very pleased with herself.

“What has he done?” Stella asks anxiously. “Why is he tied up?”

“He’s a man,” the fish-woman caws triumphantly.

“That’s a crime?” says Stella.

“And a thief!” the pale lorelei insists, and she produces the marine bladder that brought me here, wrested from my hand, and hurls it down to the rock beside me. “He’s come to hunt you!” the minx explains to Stella. “That is what they do! The legmen, they hunt us, capture us in nets. They will eat us, or put us in cages, force us to bear their children.”

“But that’s nonsense,” Stella begins, but her voice trails off into a sigh. She’s surely heard the old tales as often as I have, lonely fishermen and their captive mer-brides, although I’ve never heard of one served as an entrée. In the court of the Sun King, perhaps, or the decadent palaces of the Turks. “Well,” Stella tries again, “it may be true out there in the other world…”

“Of course it is true,” a voice wafts out from inside the cave, and another mer-female hefts herself into view. Her complexion is twilight blue, her face as broad as the moon under a quivering cloud of kinky hair, granite-gray and silver. Of all those watching us now, she seems to command the most authority, rising up on her tail to gaze down at me. “That is why we come here,” she says to Stella. “To get away from the men. They are everywhere in the world, in every ocean. Everywhere but here.”

“This man means you no harm, I swear it,” Stella insists.

“No male ever enters the lagoon, not even the Boy King,” declares my fierce captor. Her fingers are working a mollusk shell off a seaweed rope round her middle. A weapon, by the way she hefts it. Now, too, I notice teeth marks of some savage marine predator branding her pale shoulder. A wicked shark’s tooth pierces her ear lobe like a trophy. “Why else would he come all this way?”

“Looking for you,” muses the blue woman, with a speculative glance at Stella. They all heard my voice in the bubble.

“But not to hurt me,” says Stella. “Please let him loose.”

Does she think to move the loreleis from any course of action but their own desires? Hasn’t she learned from the Boys Council how heedless and willful all creatures can be in the Neverland? The blue fish dame gazes at Stella a moment longer, then moves between her and my captor down the rock toward me. If one could be said to wriggle majestically, that is how she comes at me, smoothly muscled arms pulling her forward, her rotating tail propelling her from behind, unhurried, her head erect under its cloud of quivering corkscrew curls. A thousand colors shimmer in the scales of her undulating fishtail, and when she stops to bend over me, the wine-colored aureoles of her blue breasts dangle nearly to the rock. I cannot say she sniffs at me, exactly, but her face hovers above mine as if she’s taking some measure of me, pitiful sight as I must be.

“Mica. Amber,” she says mildly to my dark-haired captor, and a brown-skinned, golden-haired female who must be her partner. “Release him.”

Astonishment gushes out of me like steam from Mount Merciless. Her eyes above me are dark marine blue, like sapphires, bright with curiosity, like all glamorous creatures, but calm and intelligent as well. I nod my thanks, and the sirens who captured me slither up alongside me. Each carries a shell honed to a blade-like edge, and they set to slicing through the strings of mesh, so close, the hairs on my body rise to the whisper of their blades. They peel the wet mesh off of me, and I sit up slowly, my arms still shaky from confinement. I shove wet hair off my face, throw the sodden length of it behind my shoulder, every atom of my person and my clothing soaked and sullenly dripping as Stella comes down the rock toward me. Over her shoulders she carries a matting of long, dried, pliable sea grasses woven together, like a cloak, and as she crouches beside me, she slides it off her shoulders and over mine. It’s blissfully dry, and warm from her body. However long we’ve been here, she’s not much worse off for her ordeal. Her cinnamon hair falls in a tangle of damp, stiffening curls, her dark eyes are alert with concern, as comforting as the dry grass cloak.

“Are you all right?” I demand, more brusquely than I intended, ashamed for her to see me exposed in all my failure.

“I’m not the one who dreads water, Maestro,” she reminds me.

I peer into her face, close enough to mine so that we might not be overheard by the curious sirens still watching us. “Why did you jump in?” I whisper to her.

She blinks at me; of course she can’t know I was watching her from my hidden boat. With a discreet movement of her dark eyes, she indicates my former captor, the tooth-branded lorelei called Mica who climbed out on the rock in the Mermaid Lagoon.

“She told me to come with her,” Stella whispers back. “She just looked at me, and I knew. Said I’d be safe here. The boys are terrified of the lagoon.”

“Of course they are,” agrees the blue grand dame, coming up again beside Stella. “That is the way we prefer it. Boys can be such a nuisance sometimes.” Her sonorous voice is low, marshy, faintly damp, but her words are clear, and her English excellent. A murmur of agreement bubbles up from the others all round the pool in tongues of which I’m far less certain.

“For that matter, Captain Hook,” the blue woman addresses me, “we have never seen you near the lagoon before.”

I suppose the wretched stories have penetrated even here. Perhaps I’m part of their folklore, passed down through their generations, the wicked legman who lives above.

“Please forgive my poor manners, Madam,” I reply, with a feeble stab at chivalry. “Have I the honor to address the queen of this place?”

But she bats away my flattery with a wave of her blue hand. “We have no queens here, Captain; that is a fantasy of the Boy King. But it is my duty to preside over this place, yes. I am called…” and she makes a lubricious sound, not unpleasant, but impossible for me to decipher. Something humorous stirs in her plump face as she awaits my response. “The closest word in your tongue,” she offers, “is Lazuli.”

“I am enchanted, Madam Lazuli,” I reply, with all the formality I can muster, half-drowned and shivering on my knees. “The fact is, I … I never expected to find hospitality in the Mermaid Lagoon. There are few enough places in the Neverland where I am welcome.”

“Because they are all controlled by the Boy King,” pipes up my captor with the shark tooth in her ear.

“But not here?” Stella wonders, turning again to blue Lazuli. “Do you mean you are immune somehow to his will?”

The blue mer-woman chuckles, like water gurgling softly over smooth river stones. “We are all women here, you see.”

I glance round the pool again, where the females are all watching us, and notice what I’d lacked the wit to appreciate before: the large-bellied women, the infants, the elders, the fierce armed guardians protecting the outer grotto.

“It’s a temple of witchcraft!” I cry.

They all burst out laughing, a rolling, musical sound with sharps of high hilarity and bass notes of scorn that echoes all round the high rock walls. Even Stella smiles, her hand touching my sleeve in gentle reproof.

“I believe it’s a birthing pool,” she corrects me.

“Yes,” Lazuli beams at her. “But it is all the same to the boys. Female cycles are very mysterious to males. It is the difference between the bold and constant sun, and the dark, ever-changing moon. They cannot quite grasp it.”

“And what they can’t understand, they fear,” says Stella.

“Peter is so innocent he does not even know what a kiss is called, but he knows to fear it beyond all things,” Dame Lazuli agrees. “He senses it will corrupt him in some unfathomable way, change everything. It is almost always wanting a kiss that gets the young girls sent home from the Neverland. Imagine how frightening an entire community of females must seem.” The blue merwoman smiles and nods toward me. “Ask your friend, the Captain.”

“But … there have been mermaid stories since the beginning of time,” I protest. “I didn’t invent them. Every sailor knows them. The lorelei, the succubus whose love is rash and all-consuming, who will drain away your soul and drown you for sport…” My words trail away to a fresh bubbling of female giggles. How absurd they sound.

“Fear itself is a powerful force, Madam.” I speak to Lazuli, but my words are meant for Stella, whose glance answers with a flicker of understanding. Here is an entire district in the Neverland beyond the Pan’s control. A place he fears.

“But in the stories,” Stella pipes up, “Peter is great friends with the mermaids. He lolls about with them on Marooner’s Rock and teases them and sits on their tails. He is the only one the mermaids allow to play their games with them in the lagoon. All the other children are jealous of him for it.”