Alias Hook (26 page)

“Let’s get out of this lagoon, in case there are any spies about,” I suggest.

Stella wrapped her gown with sea vines in the loreleis’ cavern to prevent it filling with water, and she strokes ahead for the shore as I paddle behind. She pulls herself out by a tangle of roots at the water’s edge, the wet skin of her gown clinging to every curve of her breasts and rump—pear-shaped, I notice, now that she’s out of those damned trousers. I was lately surrounded by exotic, bare-breasted sirens of the ripest carnality, the private dream of every sailor, however much he fears them, but none excited in me the same quickening as the sight of Stella sprawling on the bank in such artless abandon. In my day, women of her matronly years took pains to conduct themselves with dignity, real or imagined. But Stella flops over, flushed and giddy, without an atom of self-consciousness. And why not? There’s no one to see her but me.

I splash in closer to the shore, stretching for something solid to grasp onto. “You might lend a hand,” I carp.

“Sorry, Captain. You’re so full of surprises tonight, I thought you might walk on the water,” she blasphemes merrily.

But my clever rejoinder dies as a distant percussion I’d taken for insect clacking becomes louder, more insistent, a steady rhythm like a heartbeat. Like a ticking clock.

He sent a spy, all right.

Chapter Twenty

CROCODILE

“Captain, what is it?” Stella is staring at me.

“Listen!” Above my desperate paddling, I hear the squishing of wet leaves and grasses beneath its lumbering weight. The ticking grows louder. “It’s coming closer!”

Stella scrambles to her feet in confusion, peering about. When she sees it, her whole body jolts.

“The crocodile!” she gasps. “But I thought that was just a … a metaphor!”

My phantom hand already burns with remembered pain. I see it now, low to the ground, its massive gray-green head and snout aloft, black eyes agleam, crashing through the scrub and into the wetlands of the bank. But Stella freezes, crouching, her wet skirts gathered in her hands, watching the vile monster plowing toward her. “For Christ’s sake, woman, run!” I bellow.

She rises up a little higher on her haunches, but every move she makes to feint to one side or the other is mirrored by the beast. Yet the crocodile slows its advance, making for Stella with unusual caution. Possibly fear.

With sudden inspiration, I plunge my hook into the thick muddy bank, drag myself halfway out, grasp Stella by the elbow, and fall back into the water with her. The splash breaks over our heads, we both come up spitting and spluttering and I catch her by the waist and pull her farther out into the water.

“You call this running?” Stella cries, kicking furiously for her bearings.

“Look!” I gasp, flailing beside her. The great beast plows to where Stella was on the bank, swings its head from side to side, snapping its jaws at the empty air. But it does not pursue us.

“It’s Pan’s creature,” I exult to Stella. “It won’t come into the water here, see? The power of the loreleis is too strong.”

The monster puts its snout right down to the water, lifts its head, and turns one glaring eye toward us. But it stays onshore.

“Did you know that for a fact?”

I shake my head, trying not to actually pant with relief that I guessed correctly. We’re both paddling upright now. With a low rumbling noise, the beast onshore lowers its belly placidly to the muddy bank. To wait. The wretched ticking goes on and on.

“Now what?” Stella whispers.

“This way.” I point about a quarter of the circle of the lagoon away from where the crocodile lies, then breast the water with a mustering of strength born of desperation. With Stella close behind, I listen for the sigh of moving water, paddle to the bank in that direction and pull myself along by slimy vegetation. At last my outstretched hook lands on something solid. Not mud, not weeds. Wood. The prow of my boat, still rocking patiently at anchor at the river mouth, hidden in the tunnel of drooping branches.

“Captain!” Stella cries behind me. The ticking thunders along the bank above us. For its size and girth, the damned thing is as nimble as a snake along the muddy shore.

“The river!” I rasp to Stella. “I have a boat.”

Stella sees it now, the tip of the bows poking out of the underbrush where the river flows into the lagoon. She paddles to it, feels for the painter like an old sea hand, but I fastened it to some jutting portion of the rock on the other side of the bend.

“We’ll have to swim for it, Captain,” she pants, sounding for all the world like one of my old crew.

“Under the hull and up by the stern,” I agree. “Can you see?”

Stella dives for the boat, a ghostly glimmer of white in the dark water. A rustling of bramble answers almost directly above me, and I look up to see the crocodile’s mighty jaws gape open in silhouette against the pattern of stars, as if it were sucking in every scent, every taste, every sound that might lead to its prey. I thrash out to the bows, gulp one last breath, force myself under the water.

The keel jerks against my hand, the boat lowers in the water, and I know Stella is aboard. Hand over hook, I pull for the stern, and out to the larboard quarter furthest from the bank. I poke out my head, and ticking as urgent as hailstones assails my ears, then a splash, and the water rocks around me.

Stella’s frantic voice shrills as I clutch at timber, the monster rushing toward me on the water’s surface; it’s entered from the river side, rounding on the boat, coming for me with the speed of an arrow. I throw my hook up over the gunwale, but there’s nowhere for my flailing feet to get a purchase, no time to swing up a leg. In a frenzy of ticking, the beast’s jaws yaw open behind me as my fingers close on the gunwale. Struggling to drag myself up, I see the underside of its giant mouth pocked with scabs and sores, feel a gust of its nauseating breath. The boat rocks and I brace my flesh for the piercing of razor teeth.

Something solid shoots past my cheek, and the beast jerks violently in the water and falls away behind me. Reprieved for an instant, I clamber up over the wales, Stella’s hands clawing at my shoulders, my back, dragging me in. Looking back out over the gunwale, I see the monster paddling its short, stout legs in the water and thrashing its head wildly from side to side, its jaws still half open, gagging on some stick-like thing protruding from its mouth: the flat paddle end of an oar thrust shaft-first down its throat.

Stella crouches in the stern beside me, glaring out at the creature, her gown befouled with muck, her hair a wet, tangled mop, her expression fierce, her body alert as her fingers inch backward for the other oar.

“Wait,” I rasp. “We still have to row.” Her searching hand pauses. “Besides, I believe you’ve done for him, Madam.”

Thrashing vigorously, its scabrous body still shuddering, the monster sinks below the surface to spit out the rest of the oar or choke on it. The ticking has ceased; the rippling water stills.

“You’re an excellent harpooner,” I pant, crawling onto the thwart. “Let’s see how you fare as a coxswain.”

“Aye, aye, Captain,” she responds smartly.

I go forward to cast off the line. Stella passes me the oar and I use it like a barge-pole, thrusting the boat off the bank beneath the high canopy of branches. When we’ve backed into open water again, I manipulate my oar Indian-fashion, this way and that, nosing us into the tidal current, flowing now away from the lagoon. No phantom tributaries confound me in this direction, although I glimpse the vapors closing in around the lagoon again behind our departure. The coat I discarded earlier tonight is still in the bottom, and I hook it up and toss it to Stella; she’s shivering now in her flimsy gown, while I’m actually sweating from my labors.

But the night is mild, and after a while, the coat falls from Stella’s shoulders. I pole the oar to steady our course. I’m in more familiar waters now, know these currents like the flow of my own blood. Reeds, ferns, tangles of wild berries stretching their ferocious points in all directions, riotous night-blooming jasmine, pass by on both sides. Palm trees line the banks, with shadows of pines, firs, oaks, maple looming in a jumble beyond. We pass an enormous weeping willow trailing forlorn leaves along the surface. Even the insects have quieted; the only sound is the music of the water.

“Why did you refuse the lorelei’s offer?” I ask, at length.

Stella gazes out at the water. “I told you why.”

“The mermaids would have provided a haven for you.”

“But a cold and watery one.” She rubs her arms in a mock shiver. “I suppose I might be safer, but I’d miss the flowers and stars, and the music of a lovely night like this. I’d miss the sun.” She turns her frank gaze again on me. “I would miss you.”

My attention is demanded rounding a bend at the entrance to Kidd Creek, whose outbound current flows to the sea, where the
Jolie Rouge
lies. But I work our boat across to the opposite bank and pole along for the hidden gap in the foliage I know so well. Instantly alert, Stella takes the measure of our situation.

“We’re not going back to your ship?”

“That’s the first place he will look,” I reply.

A pair of oars should make the work easier, but I’m in no position to complain about how we lost the second one. And I’ve made my way into these neglected waters in all tides and conditions, hundreds of times, thousands. I work us through the gap concealed by brush and ferns, into a narrow tributary. I stand, planting my feet in the bottom while poling us off the larboard bank. The mud bank gives way to higher elevations of brush and rock and greenery until we’re making our way under the lee of a moderate cliff. A lively pattering of water against water sounds up ahead, and we come round the last bend in the tributary to face an apparent dead-end, a modest waterfall sheeting down from the cliff above. Stella gapes as I pole us toward the pool at the base of the falls, but it’s clumsy work with only one oar, and I can’t manage the turn into the narrow channel behind the curtain of water without earning both of us a thorough drenching from the falls we’re meant to pass behind.

Stella whoops like a girl, throws back her head to let water wash all over her, while I press on with the oar to set us back on course. I rake long strings of wet hair off my face, as she shakes out her own locks, her arms, coughing, laughing.

“You did that on purpose!” she accuses me, her eyes merry.

“I generally manage the turn with more finesse.” I muster the oar inboard and sit beside her as she bends over the hem of her gown and wrings it out. Grasping her hem in her hand, she turns impulsively toward me with the thing upraised, as if to pat me dry. We both stare, not at her alarming immodesty, but at the garment she clutches with which to clean me, the once-white fabric blackened with dirt from the road and muck from the lagoon. And we erupt together in laughter, raucous, helpless, intoxicating.

Wiping my eyes and smoothing back my hair with my own wet sleeve, I reach under the thwart and hook out my coat, still relatively dry inside, and offer it again to Stella. Still snickering, she pulls it on over her gown.

Only then does she begin to look about to see where we are.

Chapter Twenty-one

LE REVE

Beyond the waterfall, around another bend, the tributary widens into a deep, placid pool, glittering like shards of emerald under the canopy of Neverland stars. A strip of black beach nestles in the lee of a high cliff overhung with jungle vegetation. Nothing can be seen beneath the cliff, in the shadows, but I work the boat around until a proud black silhouette becomes plainly visible against the riot of stars and their reflections in the middle of the pool.

My beauty. My pride. My sanity.
Le Reve
.

She’s sloop-rigged, her canvas below, the naked spine of her mast and lines exposed to the night. Her elegant prow thrusts forward, her stern is pert, but low, for faster sailing. Her brave paintwork gleams, black trimmed in green to blend in with the black beach and surrounding jungle foliage. Her deck, less than a third of the length and width of the
Jolie Rouge,
is uncluttered and tidy, everything properly stowed and secured. She rides to anchor, poised and alert, ready to spring, ready to fly. She is everything the
Rouge
is not.

I’ve fallen silent as I work our boat round her stern, beneath the name
Le Reve,
in green. It’s another moment before I remember Stella sitting beside me. She too is rapt as I paddle us round in silence to tie up to the starboard quarter. I grasp the cable; by now it’s no surprise that Stella throws her skirts round her hips and climbs up like the hardiest old salt. I follow her up, and we stand together on a deck that shines with ghostly elegance in the starlight.

“Welcome aboard
Le Reve,
Madam,” I say.

Stella turns slowly, her eager gaze sweeping the deck, from graceful stem to clean, slender waist, to the polished wheel in the stern. There’s no stern castle, only a low rise of cabin top between the mast and the wheel.

“This was never in the books,” Stella breathes at last.

“No. It’s my secret,” I agree. “I built her.”

She turns to me in astonishment. “By yourself?”

I nod. “Mostly. Otherwise it should not have stayed secret for very long.”

Stella’s inquisitive fingers stroke the polished gunwale in her eager way of knowing a thing by touching it. Admiration shines in her face as her glance rackets all round the deck. It’s as if I’ve peeled back my skin and laid myself bare for her, a thing I’ve never done for any other living creature in the Neverland. When her vibrant gaze returns to me, I see she does not take the moment lightly. And in the perverse way of the human race, when I see how deeply she understands, the more uncomfortably exposed I feel.

“However did you manage it?” she asks, her voice hushed.

“Plank by plank. Spar by line.”

The toe of her moccasin slides along the deck, she crouches down to stroke a hatch coaming, sanded and buffed to a soft sheen. “It must have taken you ages,” she breathes.