Chapter Four

PURGATORIO

I never even hear the thump, the crash, the final bloody au revoir of yet another departing life. Once again, Death has stolen aboard and left without me.

The first I know of it is my steward, Brassy, lantern aloft like Diogenes, breathing the news at me from beside my bed in the dead of night. Dodge, who spent the night dosing himself with extra tots of rum for his injuries in the brawl, missed his footing in the ratlines during the middle watch above and dashed out his brains on the deck. Gone are the days we fought to the death for gold and glory; now my men die for football and stupidity.

“Rouse Filcher to get him cleaned up,” I mutter. “Tell the men we’ll perform the ceremony at first light.”

It would be fearful bad form just to chuck a fellow over the side, or attempt to inter him in the shifting sands of Pirates Beach. There’s not sand enough on the whole island to bury all the crews I’ve lost.

I take the fresh bottle my steward has brought me to sweeten his grim news. I’ve had the dream again: Don’t be afraid. Take my hand. An unknown companion I could almost touch. Pale moonlight streams in my stern window. Seize your chance, that’s what it said, the voice I must have dreamed. It’s no surprise my very dreams turn against me here. It’s folly to believe in phantom chances whispered on the wind in this kingdom of delusion.

The breeze is fresh but not squally as I go above in the purpling dawn in my sober black coat with the silver figures, and my plumed black hat. My best sword depends from my sash, my French cutlass, lightweight, sturdy, flint-edged and sharpened to a rapier point for both thrusting and cutting. The cultivation of coffee is unheard of here, so I always train my stewards to brew a foul decoction from local bark wood, bitter and bracing enough for whatever the day might bring. I clutch a steaming tankard of the stuff now and pace my quarterdeck.

My ship lies at anchor in the bay like a debauched whore, as she has for centuries, one broadside to the beach, the other to the sea that refuses to carry us out of the Neverland. Her head lolls to the north where the blue terraced hills beyond Pirates Beach rise into the densely forested bluffs of the wood where the beasts and the boys keep their lairs. I gaze astern to the southern end of Pirates Beach, where sprouts the fertile mouth of Kidd Creek, aburst with green ferns and palmettos. The creek snakes inland to join up with the Mysterious River which flows southward into the noxious heart of the jungle around the loreleis’ lagoon, the most treacherous place in the Neverland. Even I have never gone so far as that. Out of the jungle at the island’s southernmost tip rises the green cone of Mount Merciless, spitting a little funnel of white steam into the sky above its coronet of pink clouds. The volcano is permitted to spit, just as the beasts are permitted their razor claws and my men and the redskins our weapons. The boy delights in real danger, or his mastery over all would not be as sweet.

At the larboard rail, the men haul out the boat and lift in the slack weight of the corpse, tightly bound in hammock netting. All are somber, even Nutter, who’d have happily stove in Dodge’s brains himself yesterday. I order Needles, my sailmaker, to throw a length of canvas over the body, then I give the order to lower away.

There comes Jesse across the foredeck, his lopsided gait far less noticeable with a pistol in his hand. Sartorial splendor is no longer the fashion in their world, as it was in mine, judging by the pedestrian dress of my men. But even by their pitiable standards, the plainness of Jesse’s rig—dun-colored trousers, shirt, and cloth jacket, clean-shaven, brown hair cropped short—along with his quiet demeanor, bespeak a lifetime of fading into the crowd, escaping notice. That has changed since he came aboard the Rouge.

Carpenters called Chippy or Sticks I’ve had aplenty, stewards called Brassy for the buttons in their care, canvas-stitchers named Needles, galleymen called Cookie, each man named according to his use or temperament. Only I recognize them as remnants of the babyish names they once wore with such pride in Pan’s tribe. A fellow in the piratical trade needed an alias back in my day, but the sobriquets adopted among my crew aren’t meant to disguise a man’s identity, but to give him one.

But this fellow has earned his name. How much more formidable he looks, strapping on his brace of pistols in the molten dawn, than the furtive club-foot he was when he first arrived, before I discovered his singular talent. Gimpy, they called him then, until his first weapons drill; I’d loaded a pistol for him, and he put a ball in the center pip of a Three of Spades nailed to a canvas target. Jesse James, they call him now, in honor of a gunman famed in their world, as I understand it. Since then, Jesse has devoted himself to learning the secrets of my antique weapons. None of my men has had any notion of handling a flintlock for generations; the boys consider themselves immune to pistol shot. Bravado may make them careless, one day.

And it hits me like a broadside: a weapon the boys no longer fear. Can this be the chance foretold to me? A chance to end the boy’s tyranny forever. A chance to win. What else can it mean? Why else am I here yet again with another crew?

My sojourn has not been entirely unbroken here. There have been long passages now lost to my memory, stretches between those times when blessed solitude is welcome and the inevitable crushing despair of loneliness. But always, I find myself back on board my ship, providing refuge for another wandering soul, or two, or more, defending them from the boys, back in the teeth of war yet again. I’ve brooded over a thousand Neverland dawns in this manner, praying for inspiration—the weapon not yet deployed, the advantage not taken, the weakness not yet discovered that might bring me victory over the boy at last and end my bitter tenure here forever. And, there it lopes across the foredeck, within my grasp. Jesse.

I down the last caustic drop of Brassy’s potion, struggling to nurture this tiny seed of an idea into a bloom of possibility, as my steward himself bounds up the ladder. A quadroon, perhaps, with his café au lait complexion and a thumbprint-sized birthmark like a dull bruise on his cheek, the fellow has no conversation, but he’s quick about his work and knows to tread with better care than most belowdecks. He comes for my empty tankard, fresh from his excavation of the dead man’s effects. Their memories of what they were begin to fade like coral bleaching in the sun as soon as they arrive here, but it’s unusual not to find some forgotten souvenir from their world squirreled away somewhere.

“Sorry, Captain,” Brassy murmurs, and proffers a species of that object he knows I loathe above all others: a watch. I have banned all ticking timepieces from the Rouge for the same reason I’ve forbidden the tolling of the hours on the ship’s bell; the eternity I spend here is no fortune to be measured. I take the thing gingerly, inspect the small case of some base metal without fob or chain, strung on a leather band. But the name Hopkins is engraved upon the back of the case, which will do for now, and I hand it back to Brassy with instructions to tuck it into Dodge’s shroud.

“And what of that fleet little blade of his?” I ask.

This Brassy produces as well, with no further explanation, the blade folded innocently into its black horn handle with metal findings. I do not ask if it came from the dead man’s things or his corpse; all my men are scavengers. I examine the mechanism, revolve it in my hand with a care for my fingers, and press the button. The thin stiletto flicks out with a rasp of steel. I shove the blade back in with the curve of my hook, and drop it absently into my own coat pocket, my mind on other things.

We are six in the boat, not counting the dead man: Burley, my bo’sun, at the helm beside me in the stern, Nutter and young Flax, with his upswept bristle brush of fair hair, at the oars facing us. Jesse and lean, weathered Swab, my jack of all work, sit at the oars behind them. They are dainty with their feet so as not to tread upon the lifeless thing stowed in the bottom, and I order a northwesterly heading according to the sun.

“Stay clear of the fog bank,” I remind them.

There’s witchcraft in it, the low fog that encircles the bay and prevents escape. Only Pan knows the way through, and none of the Lost Boys he’s guided out of the Neverland ever remembers the way out when they come back to me as men. Of course, none of the Wendys ever come back.

When we are far enough out in the bay, we put a drag over the side and muster the corpse out of the bottom.

“Receive this, our good shipmate, er, Hopkins,” I intone. “May he ever find a fair berth, strong drink, welcome companions, and eternal peace in the kingdom beyond.”

To whom do I address these remarks? The sea, perhaps? My men have little interest in spiritual matters, but I always mention drink and companions in my makeshift service, things they will understand. Eternal peace I cite for myself.

My crews never expect to die here. They are young men still; Burley, who cannot be much above five and thirty, is senior among them at the moment, Flax scarcely twenty. Could I but lop off a score of years from my own vast eternity for each man, perhaps we could grow into a kind of companionship over time, or at least I might content myself with their prolonged company. But their lives here are brief. I teach them to trim the ship and defend her against the boy and his allies, school them in hunting, fishing, swordfighting, curing meat, working the garden we keep at the mouth of Kidd Creek. Such men as prove apt, I drill in artisan skills—gunnery, carpentry, sailmaking—all in hopes of extending their brief lives a fraction longer. But I can’t defend them forever, nor send them home again. All I can do is try to see that each man dies well, without suffering, without fear. For Dodge’s sake, I pray he hit the deck before his muddled wits could comprehend his fate. Another pointless loss in the game that never ends.

Why do so many come back here? Cast out of the Neverland as boys when they begin to grow up, they find themselves at odds with the other world; the dream of Neverland, however faded, haunts them still. Some dormant part of themselves beyond the grasp of memory must cry out in sleep for the tribal society of a childhood they can’t even remember and the comfortable tyranny of a leader. With the willfulness of the children they were, they dream of this place with such ferocity that Pan brings them back; perhaps he senses something familiar in the tremor of their dreaming that he has known before. But they are no longer boys and have forgotten how to fly. Pan soon chases them off to wander the Neverland as homeless outcasts, which leads them to me. Where else can they go? They were half-pirate anyway as boys, with the Pan directing their blades to any target he chose.

Are they sorry to call Pan their enemy? Certainly not. None of them remembers exactly that they were ever his creatures. They’ve simply been bred to follow a leader, and any leader will do, so long as their thinking is done for them.

We send the shrouded figure over the side, weighted down with a length of chain so no errant swell will keep it afloat, and gaze into the last of the ripples that tell where the corpse has gone. The men are sober but dry-eyed in the face of this finality, certainly untouched by the envy that consumes me. Perhaps one has to grasp at life as lustily as I once did to appreciate the majesty of death. I neither expect nor require a good death for myself; it may be as hideous as he likes so long as it is permanent.

This is what I am, what I’ve become in this place: handmaiden to the dead. My last, my only desire is to one day be rewarded for my centuries of service, earn my own passage into the Kingdom of Hades, and allowed to rest in peace. But I am aged Charon ferrying the souls of the damned to the Underworld where I can never follow. The obolus has yet to be coined that will purchase my passage out of this neverending Purgatorio.

Until now. Perhaps. I glance again at Jesse. Can I but muster the wit to seize my chance.

Last night’s drumming has long since ceased, nor do any war canoes blot the pristine blue bay, so I order Burley to make for the island. Our timber supplies are low on board the Rouge, and subject to damp and wormrot, but I have in mind to erect some sort of breastwork for Jesse to shelter behind if he’s to be effective. I try not to find the silence ominous as we tie up under the rushes in a shallow inlet beyond the northern end of Pirates Beach, a barren expanse of rock, sand, and scrub grass at the base of a bluff. A steep path has been worn into of the face of the bluff over time, a goat trail amid the bristling shrubs and bramble that marks the boys’ territory. I’ve had stakes driven in along the trail so Jesse may climb more easily, and we claw our way up, eager to work off the sobriety of death, emerging at last into the outer reaches of the wood.

Yesterday’s winds have wrought some havoc here. A few entire trees are down, those most derelict with age, bark peeling, roots exposed, shrubs and bramble flattened beneath them. Many more branches litter the ground in confusion amid the pines and twisted scrub oaks. Odd to find such damage right here in boy country, but a boon to my plans, to stumble upon so much felled wood ripe for the taking—although it occurs to me now we’ll have to go back to the Rouge for saws and axes to hew it into lumber. Which thought no sooner crosses my mind than I notice a more than usual squawking of birdlife and rumbling of earthbound beasts from the dark interior. As if the Neverland itself can hear the subversive plan in my head.

“Let’s check our traps,” I call to the men, a bit too loudly, by way of subterfuge. And I herd them away from the green, grassy, jasmine-scented path that leads into the heart of the wood, where the fairies dwell, and into a neglected thicket on the periphery where we set our game traps, where the Indians, who have the lion’s share of the great wood to hunt in as well as their own buffalo plains, rarely bother us. Yet we go in stealthily, clawing aside more fallen limbs, all of us alert to some nameless tension in the air.

“On your guard, Jess,” I murmur.

He shuffles up beside me, teeters for a second on his clumsy foot, rights himself with a fleeting grin of apology as my hook arm shoots out to steady him. The maimed and the halt. “The blind leading the blind,” I cannot help but mutter.

“Mind the ditch, eh?” he agrees, sliding out his pistol. I gaze at him sidewise, absurdly touched by the small, shared jest.

Shafts of daylight stained piney green glisten between the tree trunks, and as no shaggy predator rustles up out of the shadows, I dispatch the others to fan out ahead for our traps. We leave them yawning open under bushes and nestled between tree roots, small wooden cages, canted and weighted with painstaking precision to spring shut when the bait is taken.

“This one’s empty,” calls Burley, bending over a patch of reddish bramble. “The door be open, but the bait’s gone.”

“Same here,” reports Flax, at a stand of rocks overgrown with weedy shrubs, some distance in the other direction.

I’ve never known coney nor quail could unlatch a trap door once it’s eaten its fill. Is this some new game of the boy’s to starve us out? Hand on hilt, I strain to sense a larger trap, nod at Jesse, his pistol at full cock. A skittering of leaves behind us startles me like cannon shot; I whirl about to see a fat gray hare dart round the base of a thick pine and race off into the undergrowth.

Some formless something quivers up on the other side of the tree trunk, knocking over the now-empty trap in its haste. Too big for a boy, too small for a bear, it crouches there, swathed in some garment as gold and copper and green as the wood itself, something plaid above shapeless trousers. Fingertips stretch out to brace against the gnarled trunk; a white face peers out at us, under short-cropped hair. A human face.

This is how I always find them, plucked from their world by some errant dream to fend for themselves until I take them in. I shrug at Jesse to lower his weapon, and—

“Oi! That was our rabbit!” Nutter howls from behind me and gives chase, animating the others, who come crashing out of the underbrush from all sides, whooping and yelling.

The stranger by the tree goggles, turns and flees in the direction we’ve just come. I roar at the men to stop, but they are too excited by their game; too eager to release the tension. I can only hope to catch up to the fellow before the others frighten the wits out of him. He’s no use to me demented. I pump after him furiously, lungs heaving. If only he wouldn’t run. There’s nowhere to go.

The fog-edged horizon of Neverland Bay stretches out beyond the bluff as we emerge out of the trees. If he escapes down the trail, ‘twill be a devil of a job tracking him all over the damned island. But at the edge of the bluff, his gait falters with indecision. With my men yelping at my heels, I lunge at the fellow, hook the flapping corner of his plaid coat. It jerks the stranger round in his tracks, coat yanked open, upper body twisting toward me. For a frozen instant, his wide eyes fasten upon my hook, as mine gape at a white shirt revealed under the coat, a white shirt stretched over a pair of unmistakably female breasts.

God’s bollocks, a woman in the Neverland?

“What in the bloody hell…!” she cries, and rips her plaid off my hook, stumbles backward, trips on the scrub, and plunges over the bluff with a shriek like a banshee.