Alias Hook (34 page)

“James, is that you?” Stella emerges from behind the falls, hurrying along the bank, shift clutched up in both hands, her expression eager. “Where are you? I’ve been so worried!”

And the wretched boys swarm up out of hiding, fly across the water to surround her.

“Your codfish
James
can’t help you now, Lady!” crows Pan.

I watch in impotent horror as Stella tries to out-maneuver the boys. Twisting away, she grasps the shell whistle round her neck, but Pan rips it out of her hand with such violence that the seaweed thong breaks, and he throws the shell into the river. In an instant of inspiration, Stella feints away from the boys trying to herd her and plunges off the bank into the river herself. My heart surges; the boys fear the water!

But as she strokes out into the river, the boys shouting and heckling her from the air, Pan rises up and whistles through his two fingers. An ominous splash answers up ahead, and the nightmare shape of the crocodile comes speeding along the surface of the water, straight for Stella. She sees it, paddles in place for a frantic moment. There is nothing she can do but scramble back up onto the bank. The evil reptile might yet give chase, were that its purpose. But at Pan’s signal it sinks obediently back into the water, waiting, while the boys charge Stella with a length of rope, winding it round her arms and shoulders, despite her flailing and wriggling, until she can only kick out uselessly at boys hovering several feet off the ground.

“You’re wasting your time,” Stella challenges Pan, shaking back her wet hair, determined. “He doesn’t care anything about me.”

I am stabbed to the heart to think she might believe it. Yet how gallantly she fences not to lure me into a trap. A trap for both of us, it must be, or he’d have let the crocodile rip her to pieces.

“We’ll find out!” bleats Pan. Then he turns to his sparkling fairy. “Shut her up, Kes, so she won’t be any more trouble.” A shiver of light envelops Stella, and her kicking and squirming cease. “Glimmer her back and wait for me,” Pan instructs his fairy. “We have work to do. C’mon men!”

But now the image is fading into black water once more.

“Where has she gone?” I beg the old sibyl. “Is she safe?”

The crone shakes her snowy head. “The glass cannot see where she is,” she murmurs in her whispery voice. “Only where she was.”

I can only guess at my ghastly expression from the sympathy in Lazuli’s, scarcely notice the gentle hand the merdame lays on my arm as I struggle to collect my wits.

“As long as you are here in this grotto, the Boy King cannot detect you,” Lazuli tells me.

I nod. Merely obtaining bait is no guarantee the trap will be sprung; that takes patience, and time to do properly. As long as Pan can’t find me to demand a reckoning, Stella must be kept alive. I must find a way to free her without springing the boy’s trap.

“Stay here with us tonight, Captain,” Lazuli offers graciously. “We have many empty chambers at the moment. And no more harm will come to her while the boys sleep.”

By the time we’ve climbed down from the craggy rocks that support the water-glass, two warrior guards have surfaced in the pool with a messenger siren from the river. She pulls herself out onto the shale bank with sturdy arms, her pale skin freckled faintly green, with long, wet coils streaked in gold, copper, pewter down her back. She wriggles to Lazuli, hands her some things she’s withdrawn out of a net pouch at her waist. The blue merwife gazes at them only a moment before holding them out to me; with a pang of longing, I recognize Stella’s two soggy moccasins and the pink shell once given her in this very grotto. My hand trembles as I take the shell on its broken thong, hug it to my breast. A feeble spark of an idea fizzes in my brain.

“Is there a body of water near the boy’s lair?”

“A freshwater spring,” says Lazuli.

Pan is not yet aware that I know he’s captured Stella. The boys’ lair and surrounding wood are well-fortified against any warlike assault, but Pan will never expect me to come alone, by stealth, without my fighting men, before Pan has even issued his challenge. It’s my only chance to get Stella away before she’s made a sacrifice in the boy’s deadly game. I should go now, this minute, while the boys sleep, were my arms not already thrumming after the day’s rowing. Besides I’d be at a fearful disadvantage, alone, in the dark, with no idea where the boys keep their lair. But others on this island do know. “If she is imprisoned in boy country, I ask only one favor,” I say to the merwife.

Lazuli sighs. “We cannot guide you there. The wood is an unfriendly place to the waterborn.”

“But if I blow this shell over that spring, you will hear it?” She nods her head, and I go on. “When I sound a note on this shell, will you and your women sing the boys to sleep? At whatever hour of the day it might be?”

She is silent, regarding me. The cooing of mothers and mer-babes around the pool grows still. I fancy I can hear an ominous stropping of Mica and her warrior sisters’ shell blades.

“I will go into the wood unarmed,” I go on stoically. “I have no desire to harm the boy or the Neverland. But I will not leave her there at his mercy.” I draw another breath. “Please help me.”

“Of course, Captain,” Lazuli agrees.

The grass mats beneath me are surprisingly dry and soft on this bed of kelp arranged for me in a guest chamber of the rock that rings the pool. This is where Stella slept last night, still fitted out for company, although I fear I’ll never sleep in this eerie place, with the sirens’ lullabies wafting round the grotto and the miasma of softly shifting mineral colors above the water. Yet I must have slept, for I’m wakened in the deep of night by a feminine voice gasping and crying out in pain. Past the mouth of my cave, I glimpse blue Lazuli waist-deep out in the pool with a younger female, who is supported by others. A murmuring of hushing, cooing, urging, flutters across the water; a last crescendo of pain gives way to the thin wail of a tiny new creature, flapping a sticky tail and shaking its little fists in the crook of a blue elbow, crying for its mother’s tit.

I roll over on the mat, plump up the grass under my head, and my fingers brush some small solid, knobby thing. Pulling it out, I recognize one of the Indians’ Dream Flowers, such as Stella fed me once on board the
Rouge
. They tell you what you need to know, that’s what she told me. Hoping to see the same vision that sent her away from the grotto in such haste, I swallow it down, close my eyes again, and give myself up to Morpheus, here in the heart of the loreleis’ lagoon, on the banks of the birthing pool.

2

The chiming of a tiny bell and a rustling in the bushes startle me.

I had thought myself entirely alone in my garden, among my lavishly blooming irises and green vegetable rows. My head and shoulders draped in a length of gauze to keep off the sun while I work, I’ve even stripped off my hook so as not to damage the delicate blooms; it lies nearby in the crate under a brace of cabbages destined for the
Rouge
. The boys never come to the garden, it smacks of mundane, worldly things. That’s why this sudden activity in the shrubs that protect this place makes me jump where I kneel.

Peering around my makeshift gauze hood I spy a child, a girl, emerging from the bushes. Her dark, reddish hair is cut short in a bob, long fringe in front over her forehead. She wears the kind of shapeless nightdress the Wendys always wear; the fashions of the nursery do not change much over time.

“Don’t be afraid.”

Thus she speaks to me: Hook, the terrible, Hook, the nightmare.

“You take me by surprise.” I surreptitiously shake my shirt sleeve further down over my stump, under the length of gauze. I hadn’t realized how late it’s grown while I’ve been about my work, shadows are lengthening across the ground, an icy moon already on the rise in the blue sky.

“I didn’t know anyone was here,” says the girl.

“No one is,” I promise her.

She scrutinizes my oddly cloaked figure. “Are you some kind of hermit?”

I make a noncommittal grunt and return to my work. If she doesn’t recognize me as the terrible Hook, why should I bother to enlighten her?

“You have a beautiful garden,” she says. “May I help?”

Not that she waits for my invitation. Everything in the Neverland exists but for their pleasure, as they all assume; she is on her knees prising out clover and dandelions with practiced fingers before I can even respond. Still, it’s a rare enough child who finds pleasure in such things. She goes about it with far more skill and enthusiasm than any dozen of my men.

“Will they not miss you?” I suggest, as we work together. “The boys?”

“I’m fed up. All they want to do is wave their swords around and make a lot of noise.”

“That is the entire point of being a boy,” I suggest, and she giggles artlessly.

“But it’s so boring!” she goes on. “They never want to do anything else!”

“So he gave you leave to just … walk away?”

“I’ve given ’em the slip.” She gives her boyish bobbed hair an expressive little toss. “Peter doesn’t know everything.”

I steal a glance at her round the edge of my hood. Does he not?

“I suppose you’re off to join the pirates, then,” I suggest, with an inward sigh. She’s making it so easy, the inevitable next step in the eternal scenario. Too easy. I’d have the playwright flogged for such obviousness.

“Why?” she snorts. “They’re as useless as the boys. They never even sail anywhere. Have you seen their ship? She’s like the Flying Dutchman. I’ll bet she’s rigged out of … out of cobwebs and rags!”

And crewed by the damned, I think, as good as ghosts already. From the mouths of babes.

“I’m looking for the way out,” she tells me.

“There isn’t any,” I sigh.

“Well, of course there is,” she says stoutly. “There’s always a way to do anything. You just have to find it.”

Spoken with the utter confidence of youth. But the little creature has salt, I’ll credit her that much.

She drops a fistful of long-tailed clover in the gravel path outside the flower plot, sits back, gazes out at the leafy green vegetable rows. Then she peers up at me. “You’ve probably been here a long time. Maybe we can find it together,” she suggests.

There is a way out of course, for her and the boys; it begins just about now, when the fairies steer one of them into my path and I’m obliged to take her hostage. Another excuse for the boy to come and slaughter us all.

But what if it doesn’t play out like that? Pan doesn’t know everything, she says; her being all the way down here, at the end of Pirates Beach, is proof of that. Generally, I find them wandering in the wood.

A part of me would keep her here talking forever; how long has it been since anyone in this vile place has spoken one single syllable to me unburdened by fear or cunning? At the very least, I might compel her to tell me how she’s managed to slip away from the boys and the fairies’ notice to be out here all alone, unprotected. But the first sour notes of the loreleis’ nightly yowling have already begun, and an unwholesome hot, sulfurous tang is creeping into the air. In a moment or two, the little thing will be asleep, and utterly in my power.

No more boring games. No more bloodshed over nothing. She has earned her freedom. I can see she gets it.

I slide out my hand from the folds of gauze. “I’ll wager we can,” I tell her. “Take my hand.”

She hesitates for an instant, glances at my proffered hand and up toward my hooded face, but then she grins. “It’s a deal!” she chirps, and slides her little fingers round mine. A bracelet of tiny silver charms, one a perfect miniature bell, tinkles on her wrist.

We rise together, and I lead her some little ways down the bank to where my skiff bobbles placidly in the reeds.

“You have a boat!” she cries eagerly. “I love boats!”

This surprises a grin out of me. “So do I.”

I hand her in over the thwarts, but it’s just a formality; she knows exactly where to step and how to balance so as not to tip the boat. She steps down to the bottom, and in the act of seating herself on the thwart, turns to beam a radiant smile at me. In the next instant, she sinks all the way into the bottom, enchanted to sleep.

I watch for another long moment, to see she does not wake again, then trudge back up the bank to where I left my hook, near the cabbage bed. I’ll need it for rowing.

Purple dusk is falling in earnest now, the moon high, white, and full, as I row the skiff out of the reeds at the mouth of Kidd Creek. Heeling about, I can see the lumpen silhouette of the
Rouge
out in the bay. It will be long, arduous work, pulling all the way to Indian Beach at the north end of the island, and yet I feel strangely elated. Not merely the rare pleasure of thwarting the boy at one of his games, but something more; I might call it a lessening of the tension that always oppresses me here, a momentary relief of my usual misery. It’s a heady feeling.

I glance over my shoulder to see that the child still slumbers peacefully in the bottom of the boat. I have set my gauze all round her to cushion her from the hard, damp wood. I hope the rowing doesn’t take all night; I would hate for her to wake and know me for who I am.

“Can’t we get there a little faster?” I mutter aloud to myself, as if there were anyone else to hear.

And seemingly in the next heartbeat, I find myself, dazed and disoriented, clutching the oars, my skiff positioned near the shoals off Indian Beach. It takes a moment to get my bearings, but I am more eager now than ever to be about my task and be gone again. The braves guard their beach at all hours, but I am not a war party, and so I forge on, paddle into the shallows, then climb out and haul the skiff up onto the beach.

I can feel watchful eyes on me, so I hasten to reach into the boat and lift out the sleeping child, still swaddled in her nest of gauze. I carry her a little way up the beach to where the sand is soft and powdery and set her down. She rolls over with a soft, audible sigh, and I tuck the gauze more snugly round her and step back. There is no need to speak to the stealthy sentinels watching me; it has ever been the duty of the tribes to take charge of the children who are ready to go home and escort them to their fairy guides.