Alias Hook (44 page)

Pan and his Lost Boys clamor about in confusion far below. Angry black thunderclouds are scuttling in over the island, but Stella and I speed after Piper, away from the island, away from the rising doubloon of a moon, straight on for freedom—for whatever few moments remain for us to cherish it.

The fog bank encircling the Bay of Neverland is as cold and dense as ever, but Piper’s steady light points the way. I’ve no idea how the boundaries of the dreampath are defined, but Stella keeps me close. I know not how long we are cocooned within the fog, whether time is speeding or crawling. But it’s black night when at last we reach the outer edge of the fog bank, where
Le Reve
is waiting on the water, her lamps lit, eager to be off.

Stella and I alight on the cabin top, solid decking under our feet, real, not make-believe. Not a dream. Even Piper flutters down to the starboard rail to rest; a rhythmic pulse of light tolls her breathing.

“Odd, I never think of fairies tiring,” I tease the little thing.

Stella takes my arm. “I could’ve flown all night,” she lies.

I turn to her with the besotted grin of a man half my age, when cold panic squeezes my heart. How much longer will I look at Stella and see the face I love? Her expression sobers at once.

“James…”

“My Stella Rose,” I whisper, pulling her to me. In another breath, I might not know her face. How soon before I become again the empty husk of a man I was before the Neverland, before Stella, the raging fool I was when Proserpina cast her spell over me? Seconds tick by; in which one will Stella’s vivid dark eyes and tilted smile mean nothing to me? In which one will my heart revert again to a cold, dead stump? Stella’s arms creep inside my coat, circle tightly round me. In the next heartbeat we may each find ourselves clinging to a stranger and wondering why.

Piper bounds up, buzzes over to us. “It won’t happen yet,” she assures us. “When you are ready, I will glimmersail you and your ship off on your journey. You won’t forget until I am gone.”

“Then please don’t rush off before I’ve offered you my thanks,” I rejoin smoothly. Stella and I dare to unclench. “That dust you brought us saved our lives.”

“Fairy dust is no use on its own,” the little imp chides me.

“But, how could we fly?”

“Mortal magic,” she shrugs again, and wafts over to the binnacle to admire her sparkling trail in the glass. I frown at Stella, who looks as mystified as I. Piper darts back to me and thumps a tiny hand on my chest. “Mortal magic,” she repeats. “To fly without wings. Part of the mystery the Sisterhood will never understand.”

“You can’t mean love!” Stella exclaims. BellaAeola told us in no uncertain terms what she thought of mortal love.

“The boys don’t love,” I snort.

“But they do!” says Piper. “They love their life, their tribe, their leader, their youth. They love to win their games. Nothing constrains them. They expect to be delighted every moment of every day in the dream world they’ve made; in such an intensity of joy, all that’s needed is fairy dust to fly at will.”

“Then why are the Neverland skies not raining Indians and loreleis?” I wonder. “Surely they love each other no less than Stella and me.”

“The Indians and merwives do not ask for dust,” Piper shrugs. “They find joy enough in the worlds they inhabit, the earth, the water. It is all the magic they need. But for boys and Wendys, it’s the dream itself, the powerful dreaming of childhood, that gives them joy. Fear, anger, and disappointment weigh them down.”

“As my men are weighed down,” I murmur. As I was myself for so long, too fearful, too angry to embrace the magic of the place and its marvelous creatures. “And Pan has never felt these things?”

“Some part of him suspects he has,” the fairy sighs. “He has suffered many losses, far, far more than you have, Captain. He has been there so much longer. He cries over them sometimes in his sleep.”

“I have heard him.”

“But we take very great pains to charm him anew every day,” Piper goes on. “This is where Kes is so valuable, soothing him, stoking up his humors, chasing away the darkness, because she is so devoted. Should he ever understand the magnitude of his sorrows, it would unleash a torrent of despair that would swamp the Neverland and all who live there.”

And for the first time ever in my life, I feel a renegade tremor of empathy for the poor little bastard. Is he as trapped as I was in his eternity of childhood? Does he never long to escape? Never, ever? “What happens if Pan grows up?” I ask her.

“He never grows up. The children of the world need a champion to stand up to the grown-ups and win—even if it’s only in a dream. That is the bargain he made for his eternal youth, once upon a time, a little motherless child full of outrage at the unfair grown-up world. That is the price of his rule in this place of dreams.” Piper tilts her head thoughtfully at me. “Your own dream became overpowering, Captain. It outgrew the Neverland, stretched toward something more important than Peter, something that excluded him. He couldn’t bear it, that he was no longer the focus of your life.”

“As you were the focus of his for so long,” Stella says to me. “No wonder Kestrel wanted to get rid of you.” She turns again to Piper. “That’s why she wanted me there, isn’t it? She didn’t care about my dreampath, but if I helped break the spell somehow, James would become mortal again. And the next time Peter … killed him … would be the last.”

“My sister behaved very badly,” Piper agrees sadly. “And I did not see it. I was thoughtless enough to believe that Kestrel’s interest in breaking the spell was the same as mine.”

“Which was?” I prompt her.

She shimmers at me in surprise. “Your freedom.”

“Why did no flying boys ever discover this beautiful ship?” Stella asks the fairy.

“We charmed it from their sight,” Piper confesses. “I convinced the Sisterhood how important it was, and Kes could not betray us.” She turns again to me. “You needed your refuge. You needed your work.”

“But why should the Sisterhood care about me?” I wonder.

“Your coming did a great service to the Neverland,” she tells me, dawdling along on the air like a tiny seagull riding a breeze. “We agreed that in return, you had earned your sanctuary. And such a lovely thing you made there,” she glimmers happily, spiraling round in the air as if to take in the whole of my sloop.

“With your help, I believe.”

The little creature makes a pretty, self-effacing shrug. “How else would you ever finish?”

“You kept warning me about my last chance,” I continue.

Piper shakes her tiny head in apology. “I was too hasty the first two times. I thought you were nearer to breaking the spell than you were.”

Stella peers intently at the little creature. “The fairy of the earth, the sea, and the air,” says Stella. “You were the instrument of Proserpina’s spell.”

“I would feel the tremors of her spell before the others,” the imp agrees.

“Then, you were supposed to determine when James broke it.”

“No, it was in my power only to open the passage when the time seemed near. The passage between ours and the mortal world.”

“The shadow of the earth across the Neverland moon,” I whisper. “Red Eclipse.”

“You were so close to breaking the spell before,” Piper says to me. “A spontaneous act of kindness, a glimmering of wisdom. But you were never quite ready to leave. This time I had to be sure. The passage closes as soon as the next moon rises to her new position, and this was your last chance.”

“You were there the night Bill Jukes died.”

“Yes, Captain. You did him a very great kindness.”

“You were there when I first met Stella.” I recall the tinkling bell charm on the girl’s wrist, heard so often in my dream. Ring a bell to summon a fairy.

“As a witness only. I had no need to interfere. She eluded the boys all by herself. It was by her choice alone to reveal herself to you. To trust you.”

“I had no earthly idea who you were,” Stella says to me.

“No,” Piper smiles at her, and then turns again to me. “It was your decision to escort her to the First Tribes. I only helped get you there faster.”

Glimmersailing, of course. No wonder I dreamed so often of a flying ship above the stars.

“I was so eager to see justice done,” the little fairy beams at me.

“Justice?’ I echo in surprise, gazing at her.

Piper nods, idly adjusts the preposterous coils of her black hair, shakes particles of dust from the folds of her tiny gown.

“But … why do so much for me?”

She pauses in her maneuvers to gaze at me. “Because I am your fairy, Captain.” She hovers before me, shimmery wings softly thrumming. “I have always been your fairy.”

It takes my breath away. All those years, decades, centuries I wasted in fear and rage, misery, appalling loneliness. Had I only sought relief. Had I only opened my eyes, my hand, my heart. I raise my elbow and she lights upon it, weightless as a butterfly. We peer at each other.

“Thank you for your extraordinary patience,” I whisper.

“Thank you for your trust, Captain,” she says, with a soft, glimmering smile. “It was worth the wait.”

“I will never forget all you’ve done for us,” I tell her.

“Of course you will,” she reminds me gently.

The last shreds of fog are beginning to stretch apart. Beyond, I glimpse the miracle for which I’ve hungered for over two centuries: a sweeping vista with no Neverland in sight, a broad black sea stretching to the far horizon under stars I know. The Southern Cross. The Phoenix. And I realize how little time is left. It’s the damnedest feeling, knowing the moment we most crave, to begin our lives anew back in the world, is also the moment we dread above all others.

As if we yet dream the same dream, Stella moves beside me again, laces her fingers tightly through mine. I press myself into her warmth, command every cell in my body to cling to her impression, even if my capricious brain forgets. Can it ever be enough? It may happen at any moment now, the enchantment from which Stella and I will never wake. Impervious even to True Love’s Kiss.

An impulse too fleeting to pass for a fully-fledged idea shudders inside me. “It would please me very much to leave you something of mine, in thanks,” I say to Piper. “Will you grant me one more moment to get it?”

She rises gently off my elbow. “You owe me nothing, Captain. But one moment more will do no harm.”

I hurry below, the memory of Stella’s trusting fingertips against my skin as sweet as a kiss. Can memory be encoded in a touch, an object, a scrawl of ink? I find the cabin much as I left it my last night on board, the night I saw Stella in my dream, the bedclothes in disarray, her neatly folded clothing piled in a corner. The volume of
Paradise Lost
sits on the bed shelf, alongside the flamboyant pink plume.

I can scarcely grasp the feather for the trembling of my fingers. Pressing its shaft to the wooden shelf with my hook, I pluck out a single slender frond, no thicker than a silken thread, and lay it aside. Gripping the shaft with my fingers, I apply the tip of my hook to its point. Its clumsy enough work, but in the absence of the materials I need, I must improvise. It may not be a kind of fairy enchantment at all, the price demanded by the Neverland, the same rules may not apply. But I must try. And there’s so little time.

In the end, we are more resolute than we ever thought possible. What would be the point of spending our last few moments together in misery? We have already endured so much unhappiness, Stella and I. We choose to embrace our joy for as long as it lasts.

“It will be like waking from a dream,” Piper promises us; she sports the pink flamingo thread I gave her plaited fetchingly through a loop of her black hair. “You will feel neither pain nor sadness. You will be in the place you’ve chosen with the adventure of your lives before you.”

We stand together in the bows, not the helm, as we’ll not be sailing
Le Reve
in the usual way. Stella has changed back into her plaid jacket, jersey and trousers. She fears she’ll be taken up for a madwoman should she set foot in Scilly garbed in a nightdress and leaves. All that remains of the Neverland are the buckskin slippers on her feet. The last wisps of fog are slipping astern of us, revealing what is now an enormously fecund white pearl of a moon high in the sky.

I turn to Stella, cradle her face in my hand. Kiss her beautiful tilted mouth one last time. “Don’t give up,
ma rose, ma coeur;
” I whisper to her. “You are always in my heart.”

She takes my hand in both of hers. Her eyes are bright, her smile unbearably valiant. “I love you, James. Goodbye.”

A lavender-blue spark rises from the rail. A tide of moonlight washes across the deck as
Le Reve
emerges from the fog and soars into the air against a canopy of stars, but I find I am too weary to watch any more.

What words can possibly name the riotous dream I’ve had? Yet I feel not unduly grogged, as I peer, blinking, about the decks of this smart little sloop-rigger. A light leading wind from south by southeast ruffles her tops where she rides high on the flow tide alongside the quay of a pretty little harbor. I do not know it, or have not seen it in a long time.

From the larboard bows, I peer out into a wide, deepwater bay giving way to a broad channel studded with rocks of all shapes and conditions, jagged islets, the dark silhouettes of distant islands. Not the Caribbees; the breeze is too cold and smells of northern things, brine and salt, not spice. Red dawn bleeds across the sky, turning the sea to wine.

What pert little vessel is this? I marvel at her clean lines as I cross the deck to judge the character of the harbor. Reaching for the starboard rail, I jolt at the sight of something hideous emerging from my right sleeve; bugger me, it’s a length of black iron curved like a hook. No less shocking than the look of the ghastly thing is the instinctive ease with which I’ve tossed it over the rail. Whatever befell my hand, it must have happened long ago. Mercifully, my left hand appears to be intact, and as it closes upon the rail, something stirs within me, some primal feeling beyond the power of verbal intelligence to name. I sense it in my skin upon the polished wooden rail, in my bones, in my heart. This is my ship.